Müller UK & Ireland is tackling water efficiency by utilising various management systems, tools, behaviours and resources.
David Douglas, who has an engineering degree as well as a Masters in Environmental Management, took over the role as Group Sustainability Manager for the whole UK Müller Group in April 2014. He brought the Müller Dairies and the Wiseman Dairies together to tackle water efficiency.
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Douglas says that for things to work efficiently, the group needs to benchmark itself internally by looking in the business at where the best practices are. By identifying areas where things are being done well and collating that information to come up with a strategy to align the group and drive improvement.
The company has an on-site water treatment plant at your Bridgewater facility that uses membrane technology to treat waste, which they built in stages using existing technology. They first constructed a dissolved air flotation (DAF) plant, which is a treatment process that clarifies wastewater by the removal of suspended matter, and then installed a membrane bioreactor (MBR).
This system has allowed the company to treat the waste water to bathing water standard; the water was then pumped through a balancing pond into a stream. Once this system was fully in place, and after doing tests, a full-scale reverse osmosis facility was built. Half of all waste water is filtered through the reverse osmosis plant and is then fed back into the mains water tanks for re-use.
Once everything was sorted at the Bridgewater site, the same was done at the Droitwich Spa facility, where 60% of the water is recycled. Even though the water is basically sterile, it is still dosed with chlorine dioxide as well. One of the unintended consequences though, is that the group have actually reduced chemical use by using this system.
According to Douglas, this technology could easily be used and would benefit other sectors as well, and he says that now as water climbs up the agenda, more companies need to seriously start looking at innovative sorts of ways of reusing water.
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