how we help industries to circulate water & energy

Since 1977, we help a broad range of industries to clean their wastewaters in the most efficient way and reuse their treated water as to save fresh water where feasible. As a result of the first energy (fossil fuel) crises, more industries got interested to recover renewable energy from their wastewaters and to save energy in its classic oxidative treatment. In close collaboration with Prof. Dr. ir. Willy Verstraete and his team at the Ghent university, we developed and applied our pioneering high-rate anaerobic digestion (HRAD) plants. Our first HRAD plants converted up to 80% of the organics in the waste-water (as COD) to biomethane. Today, our latest high-rate AD+™ plants convert up to 99% of the organics to biomethane on various wastewaters including those from biofuel industries yielding up to 41 MW biopower in our recent AD+™ plants.

In parallel, as the environmental standards in Europe and in other parts of the world become more stringent, we develop and apply our unique AS+™ technology which upgrades the core Activated Sludge (AS) process as used in more than 95% of all sewage and wastewater treatment plants worldwide. AS+™ adds innovative bioprocesses that capture, crack and biodegrade a wide range of recalcitrant organics from synthetic dyes in textile wastewaters and various “hard” organics in other industrial wastewaters down to the micropollutants in municipal sewage such as residual medicines. In addition, add-in AS+™ bioprocesses convert all nitrogen compounds very efficiently (via partial nitritation and anammox) directly to inert nitrogen gas (80% in air). AS+™ converts up to 99% of both the  organics (as COD) and the nitrogen compounds (as total nitrogen TN) as proven at full scale. The resulting AS+™ effluent is very clean and clear and suitable for direct reuse after optional NF/RO membrane filtration if/as needed ensuring the longest membrane service life at the lowest operating costs as proven in our sustainable water reuse (SWR) units.