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The food and drinks industry will be one of the very first sectors
that will need to comply with the new Integrated Pollution Prevention
and Control (IPPC) regulations.
By 2004, individual members of the industry will need to be ready
to apply for an IPPC permit, having taken positive steps to prevent,
reduce and eliminate pollution at source through the efficient use
of natural resources.
Larger companies in the food and drinks industry will have some
familiarity with what will be required, since the new IPPC regulations
are built on current IPC regulations. However, IPPC will also introduce
regulations in new areas such as waste management and site protection.
Being one of the very first sectors to be expected to meet IPPC
regulations, the food and drinks industry is naturally at a disadvantage.
It has less time to prepare and cannot learn from the experiences
of other sectors of industry. Effective solutions have to be found
and put into use now.
Fortunately, there are existing, well-proven technologies available
which can assist you - and simultaneously offer you considerable
cost savings too.
IPPC requires effective waste management and the minimising of pollutants.
These two factors don't just make good environmental sense - they
make good economic sense for you too: wasted product is wasted money.
It's literally money down the drain. Discharge costs and treatment
costs are likewise reduced if you can cut the amount of pollutants
you produce.
So how can you achieve this? How do you discover which processes
are wasteful and adding to your discharge levels?
The answer lies in the careful, continuous monitoring of your drains
and outfall for spikes in contaminant levels. If you know precisely
when and where excess waste is being dumped into the drains, you
can most likely identify which machine, or which process, has caused
it. Then you can take action.
The problem has meant that the two most commonly used methods of
water pollution monitoring - the BOD and COD tests - are not up
to the level of monitoring required. Neither test can be conducted
on line or in real time. BOD tests typically take five days to achieve
results from a sample, and even much faster COD tests are still
not quick enough to help you catch and recognise an event.
The only test capable of offering continuous real time monitoring
is the TOC - Total Organic Carbon test. TOC monitoring can be performed
in real time, on-line giving detailed, minute to minute coverage
of events as they occur. This means it can pick up fast, transient
spikes caused by a faulty machine for example, and help to identify
the source of the waste.
The implications of on-line TOC monitoring are obvious. If you can
identify and eliminate wasteful processes, you can save money on
product. If the product isn't being dumped into the drains, your
discharge costs will be reduced, offering even more cost savings.
This is good business sense, but there are even bigger implications.
If you can use TOC monitoring to cut waste product and discharge
levels, it can obviously help you in preparing for IPPC.
One company which has been quick to recognise the role TOC monitoring
will play in helping industry prepare for IPPC is Severn Trent Water.
The company has pioneered services to industry in this field, helping
companies to move towards IPPC compliance while actually helping
them to achieve significant cost savings at the very same time.
The company is so confident that it can help industry make big savings
that it is not charging a flat fee, but only a percentage of the
money it helps to save!
Since December 2000, Severn Trent Water has been working with Coors
Brewers at the company's Burton site near Birmingham. The aim of
the partnership is not just to achieve 100% compliance with IPPC
but also to help reduce costs and maximise benefits from the capital
investment. To do this it has created a strong process template,
which has been utilised to great effect on the site and has been
accepted by the customer as being at the forefront of best practice.
"We look at waste in the following ways," explains Terry Duffy,
Project Manager at Severn Trent Water: "What it is, where it comes
from, how it gets there, where does it end up - and how can we reduce
it."
Coors Brewers, Burton had already recognised the benefits of having
TOC analysers on-line on-site and had purchased four PROTOC® analysers
from PPM in the recent past. One had been positioned on the final
discharge to identify any surges and alarm so that the surge could
be safely diverted. Others had been positioned on the common discharge
from the brew houses, on the common discharge from two filter rooms
and on another part of the final discharge.
Whilst the technology was in place, what Coors Brewers lacked was
a strategy for analysing what the PROTOC® units were really telling
them. Severn Trent Water provided this expertise and appraised several
months of data recorded by the PROTOC® analysers to identify and
eliminate the causes of the peak TOC readings - which often represented,
product being lost down the drain. Some were mechanical failures,
or instances of human error. Other events were a result of timings
or pressures being incorrectly set.
Now that the causes of waste were being identified, Coors Brewers
could rectify them. This quite naturally, excited them enough to
install another three PROTOC® analysers to help track down other
potential sources of wastage on site.
At this point it's only reasonable to ask why so many PROTOC® analysers
were utilised. Why wasn't one analyser put on-line in one place,
process faults detected and then the analyser moved on to the next
position? The answer is that the analysers continued to more than
pay for themselves when left in-situ. It was found that, over a
three month period, the cost saving achieved halved when the analyser
was removed. Why? Because new problems could occur after the analyser
was removed, such as a machine fault or human error. Coors Brewers
and Severn Trent Water found it a far more economical option to
leave the analysers in place and continue to pick up any new problems
immediately as they arose.
For example, another Coors Brewers site fitted with PROTOC® analysers
achieved a 40% reduction in wasted product. The analyser was then
removed. Three months later, savings were only running at 20%. When
the analyser was reintroduced, savings returned to 40%.
PPM has gone some way towards reducing the capital costs of introducing
multi-location TOC analysis on larger sites with its unique Spyder
and Web system which can offer considerable cost savings for users
requiring multi-point effluent monitoring, triple validation or
100% stream monitoring. Standard PROTOC® analysers feature both integral
control and analysis equipment. However, one PPM SPYDER control
unit can control AND monitor up to eight low-cost WEB analyser units
networked together. Both are based on PPM's best-selling PROTOC®
technology, but WEB analysers cost considerably less than individual
PROTOC® units. Each WEB unit offers dedicated TOC analysis well as
a choice of three additional monitoring functions which may include
pH, flow, and turbidity.
By all accounts, Coors Brewers has been very impressed by the service
offered by Severn Trent Water using PPM PROTOC® analysers. "Far from
the IPPC legislation being a threat, working towards the legislation
with Severn Trent Water has produced many benefits, namely reduced
environmental impact and reduced financial risk," says Barry Goodwin
from Coors Brewers. "We've achieved considerable annual costs savings
and 96% consent compliance already."
Utilising on-line TOC technology to achieve IPPC compliance is a
win-win situation. Not only is it a fast, reliable and effective
method of identifying waste and helping to reduce discharge levels
- uniquely so in fact - but it can also more than pay for itself
along the way by helping to cut treatment costs and cutting out
wastage.
With IPPC only a couple of years away for the food and drinks industry,
the combination of proven TOC technology and the expertise of companies
like Severn Trent Water who have now fully realised the benefits
of TOC analysis, is surely one of the best ways to ensure compliance.
Pollution & Process Monitoring Ltd
Bourne Enterprise Centre
Borough Green
Sevenoaks
Kent TN15 8DG
Tel: +44 (0) 1773 717318
Fax:+44 (0) 1732 780190
E-mail:  TOC@pollution-ppm.co.uk |
