Design of an Innovative Plant for the Wastewater Recovery and Purification in the Food & Beverage Industry

The food & beverage (F&B) industry is among the most water intensive sectors with thousands of litres per hour of raw water requirement. Starting from the statement of this issue, an overview of the evidences from the field and a quick survey of the existing technologies for the raw water saving through its local collection and treatment before discharge, this paper investigates the design of an innovative industrial plant for the water closed-loop recovery, purification and local reuse. Actually, a prototype of such a plant is working within a mid-size F&B company operating in the Emilia-Romagna region, Italy. The plant nominal capacity is of about 45,000 l/h of discharged wastewater. It integrates water ultra-filtration and reverse osmosis technologies. Details of the functional module design and of the logic of control are in the present paper. Finally, few preliminary evidences from the plant field-test are provided.