MechChem Africa talks to Miles Murray, director of business development for Veolia Services Southern Africa (VSSA), about water reuse and the local role Veolia is playing in delivering on the global Group’s core purposes, ecological transformation and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
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We spent the first week of 2022 preparing tenders for ongoing water reuse projects, in anticipation of their renewable and possible expansion,” begins Miles Murray of Veolia Services Southern Africa (VSSA).
One of Veolia’s historic flagship projects has been treating wastewater and supplying it for reuse to local industries in KwaZulu-Natal for the past 20 years. The project was one of the first water related public private partnership (PPP) of its kind and the first to adopt a new contractual model for financing new infrastructure. The municipal owner didn’t have to find the upfront capital to get the project up and running, and the project is estimated to have freed up potable water for use by 400 000 people in the area, while actually reducing the need for municipal investment in new water treatment infrastructure in the area.
The private industries using the water benefitted from a saving of 52% in water tariffs by reducing the amount of potable municipal water consumed; the municipality and the local community benefitted from the freeing up of scarce potable resources for human use; and the municipality became known as an early adopter of sustainable water-resource development.
“We are currently still contracted to ‘sell’ high quality (nearly potable) water to manufacture fine paper, and refinery process water,” Murray tells MechChem Africa, adding that the new tender includes the additional supply of potable water for the local community. “This is very exciting. We are stepping up this water reuse project from being purely about industrial water provisioning to being a full-on reuse project to provide potable water and sanitation to the municipality,” he says.
In principle, he says, the current project is probably only two membrane-based processes short of being able to produce potable water. “We simply need to add an ultra-filtration (UF) and a reverse osmosis (RO) treatment process to produce drinking water compliant with SA’s SANS 241 standard,” he informs MechChem Africa.
“We remain determined to ensure that this flagship project remains successful and continues to fly the Veolia brand. We will, therefore, do everything in our power to ensure that it continues to run smoothly,” he adds.
Globally, to promote ecological transformation across the planet, Veolia’s first priority is to implement as many of the UN’s SDGs as possible, and 13 of these goals are being explicitly targeted. “This means that everything we do is aligned to these long-term objectives and we will never allow short term gains to tarnish our brand. Veolia is a truly international entity that is committed to protecting the future for our children’s children,” Murray says.
“This is not all about delivering advanced technologies. Our mandate is to also focus on employment, for example, which is another of the SDGs. So here in South Africa, we continually strive to find improvements on traditional, well-known treatment technologies.”
Water reuse in the food and beverage industry
Another area of increasing demand for water reuse technologies in South Africa is in water challenged areas such as the Eastern Cape, where businesses are coming under pressure to reduce their offtake from the local municipalities. “We are currently running a resource recovery project in Mossel Bay with a dairy producer, for example, with wastewater volumes that contain organic matter from milk, yoghurt and cheese residues,” Murray continues.
Using Veolia’s Memthane® technology, which combines anaerobic biological treatment and membrane separation, the company can provide an innovative and environmentally friendly waste water processing system that produces a methane rich fuel gas from organic solids, while also delivering high quality potable water for reuse in the process. In Mossel Bay, the methane gas is stored in pressurised tanks for use in the factory’s boilers and even the sludge that remains is reused by the local farming community as a fertiliser.
This project is currently converting a minimum of 60% of the wastewater to potable standards. This is combined with the incoming municipal stream on the factory side of the water meter, reducing demand and associated costs. “If a producer is paying R34/m3 for water and the water recycling costs are between R18 and R22/m3, then installing a wastewater treatment plant can be very cost effective as well as environmentally friendly.
“While the company gets kudos for reducing its offtake and for reducing municipal effluent treatment requirements, we estimate the payback period based on the current reuse rate to be in the region of eight years – and this doesn’t include the cost reductions due to expenses and fines associated with having to safely dispose of these effluents, which can ratchet up very quickly.
“Going forward, we seek to take care of the wastewater treatment requirements from end to end. Clients come to us with an effluent and ask us what we can do with it. We will then analyse the treatment needs and identify the offtakes, their potential value and the residue disposal costs. From a water perspective, we can make the water environmentally friendly and safe at many levels: for direct use as grey water in the factory, for discharging back into the environment as surface water, or we can treat it for use at any quality level required,” Murray informs MechChem Africa.
In addition, issues such as pipe bursts can cause water dependent businesses to come to a grinding halt for two to three days. Properly managed reuse systems can significantly reduce these risks.
While water reuse is gaining traction in South Africa, Murray says that water costs are still reasonably cheap compared to international standards, which makes investments harder to justify. “We are responding to this challenge by putting funding mechanisms in place to make it easier for users to invest in reuse systems such as these,” he notes.
Options include securing finance for an eight to ten year repayment period on capex, which can make a business case quite strong with respect to returns. “We are happy to consider co-funding of such systems or success-based models that are funded via shared savings accrued from reduced water bills and valorised biogas and the recovery of other resources.
“Financiers are often willing to fund the capex, while Veolia can put a deal together based on a monthly service fee to operate and maintain the plant for the duration of the contract. This ensures that clients benefit from the financial and environmental values while demonstrating responsible resource management,” Murray points out.
“This is pretty much what we have been piloting in KZN for the past 20 years. Without having to go to high-end technologies, we are now in a far better position to implement efficiency optimisation improvements and monitoring systems to give early warnings of changes to the inflow, TDS loads or system filtration efficiencies. When wastewater of an unexpected quality enters a treatment system, the fouling on downstream membranes and such can quickly become hugely problematic and expensive. Careful monitoring and management can help to avert such problems,” he explains.
Making sure that water is fit-for-purpose can reduce scaling, fouling of pipes and corrosion. Citing a success in the gold mining industry he says a refinery was able to save around tens of millions per year by reducing the corrosion damage on its pumps. “Each pump was costing in the region of R8-million and the mine was having to replace up to six pumps a year. By getting the water quality right, only two pumps had to be refurbished in the following year, which saved on both the pump replacement costs and on associated downtime,” he says.
“Veolia Services is an environmental company that, as well as water, looks at energy and solid waste management. Underpinning all of these services, we strive to deliver the SDGs by embracing a shared and responsible approach for the mutual benefit of the planet, society, our clients, employees and shareholders.
“We believe this makes Veolia a model company for delivering ecological transformation,” Murray concludes.
