Rapid COD Testing Pays for Itself in 3 Months

Bridgnorth Aluminium, which makes aluminum products for the lithographic industry, says its new onsite effluent treatment plant, Camlab’s Mantech PeCOD system, paid for itself in three months and continues to save the company money.

Bridgnorth Aluminium wanted to reduce its water discharge, comply with water authority consents, increase onsite water recycling, and optimize chemical treatment of all wastewater, while saving money from all of these actions.

Until last October, Bridgnorth Aluminium didn’t measure chemical oxygen demand onsite. Instead, the local water authority performed quarterly tests to measure both organic pollutants and water quality. The company has a COD discharge consent and any breaches result in fines. During wastewater treatment, overuse of chemicals causes increased costs while under-treatment can cause a breach of consent.

In an effort to minimize chemical treatment, optimize the new effluent plant design and introduce routine high-quality COD monitoring, the company invested £600,000 ($879,342) in the Mantech PeCOD system, a nanotechnology-based approach to COD analysis.

The 10-minute test doesn’t use dichromate and allows the company to run multiple tests every day.

“The PeCOD has very clearly paid for itself in just the first three months,” says Chris Jones, research chemist. “It allows us to do testing we simply couldn’t have done any other way.”

In other efforts to make wastewater treatment more efficient, Lamb-Weston, a division of potato processing giant ConAgra, installed an ADI Systems ADI-BVF anaerobic reactor for wastewater, which has allowed to recover biogas while minimizing electrical energy use and the amount of waste solids requiring disposal.