Support On Hand when it’s Crunch Time in the Apple Milling Season

For the sixth successive year, UK company Siltbuster Process Solutions (SPS), the leading specialist in water and effluent treatment, has provided Heineken’s Universal Beverages Ledbury (UBL) with a bespoke large-scale temporary Dissolved Air Flotation (DAF) system. This has enabled the beverage specialist to treat peak effluent flows during the site’s annual apple milling period.

UBL’s Ledbury plant in Herefordshire was the UK’s first large-scale beverage production facility, and is now a dedicated fruit and vegetable milling operation, capable of processing up to 15,000 tonnes per day.  The apple milling period, which typically extends from late August to late November, pushes production to its peak, resulting in significantly higher levels of waste water with additional suspended solids and COD loading onto the site’s own large effluent treatment plant.

At other times of the year, the site’s existing advanced effluent treatment plant, which employs a combination of aerobic and anaerobic processes, is capable of treating the flow and load generated from the site’s production activities. However, during the apple milling period, as the flow and load massively increases, so existing treatment processes need to be supplemented.

UBL first approached SPS in 2010 to address this problem and provide temporary plant to protect the anaerobic reactor from the impact of the suspended solids. SPS’s unique offering meant that it could provide a temporary solution in a very short timeframe, for a hire period of five months throughout the milling season.

The solution involves two D100 packaged lamella DAF units and all the ancillary mixed reaction tanks, containerised dosing and pumping equipment to provide the necessary pre-treatment capacity when it is needed. The DAF units are flexible, modular, easily transportable and ideally suited to food and beverage sector applications, whether the flow rate is 1m3 or 150 m3 per hour.

Clwyd Jones, Business Development Manager at SPS, says: “We’re very pleased to be associated with such a prestigious manufacturer as UBL and to support them for the sixth year. The long association with UBL demonstrates how our DAF units and services are particularly suited to the food and drinks industry, where short-term solutions are often needed to support peak production periods.

“Being local and having an extensive fleet of equipment, plus a team of experts, means we can be mobilised incredibly quickly. At short notice, our clients get that all-important additional capacity but without the need for a significant capital investment.”