Strategy towards the use of ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis for industrial water recovery and reuse as part of the Green Deal Implementation

In line with the European Parliament's Resolution of February 10th, 2021 on the new action plan for a closed economy, most of the activities undertaken in the wastewater treatment process should focus on the search for new technologies that use wastewater as a source of water and nutrients. The paper reviews the concept of water reuse in industrial installations, with special emphasis on the use of membrane technologies for this purpose. The results of authors' own research on effectiveness of using ultrafiltration (UF) and reverse osmosis (RO) processes to recover process water from brewery wastewater, following pretreatment by the BIOPAQ (R)-IC process, are presented. Raw wastewater, after averaging the parameters, was digested in an anaerobic reactor, followed by deodorization and oxidation of sulfides to sulfate in an oxidation process in a pretreatment tank. The water recovered from pretreated brewery wastewater by UF and RO membrane techniques was found to be suitable for boiler feed, cooling technology and washing process without directly cleaning beer bottles. The study used a ZeeWeed capillary immersion ultrafiltration module operating under vacuum and a module equipped with a Filmtec XLE 2125 reverse osmosis membrane. The technology improved the efficiency of contaminant removal, yielding purified and high-quality water toward the implementation of the assumptions of Circular Economy and Green Deal Implementation.