Zeeblok
Zeeblok detail
Water shortages, especially when it comes to agriculture, are a growing concern. Municipalities are cracking down on water usage and waste water issues. Growers need to manage their water better than ever before to ensure compliance with environmental standards and to maintain positive public perception.
Three years ago SUEZ Water Technologies & Solutions created the ZeeBlok filtration configuration using the company’s existing ZeeWeed membrane, which has been in use for more than 30 years.
It’s the same membrane used in municipal and industrial water treatment, scaled down to be functional in wineries and food processing operations. Microscopic pores in the ZeeWeed polymer membrane create a physical barrier to solids, bacteria and viruses in wastewater. This results in a high-quality effluent.
Scott Taggart, SUEZ’s commercial engineering systems leader says ZeeBlok was created to be a highly flexible building block to work easily within existing infrastructures in wastewater treatment plants (WWTP).
“Our customers are able to achieve better performance while minimizing the capital cost of building a new system,” Taggart says. “They can use the same footprint and upgrade their WWTP to provide higher quality treated water than conventional systems.”
One of SUEZ’s partners is Winesecrets, a California company focused on making better wines and building better wineries. Owner Eric Dahlberg notes that ZeeBlok is a product on the side of building better wineries. A number of years ago Dahlberg started working with GE (now SUEZ) in a distribution partnership.
“They’re big into water treatment, so when we started working with them, they had all these products that are useful to wineries that we were able to bring online,” he explained.
“I found out about these membranes three years ago and started promoting them two years ago. Last year we had our first trials and then installs and that’s continuing.”
Dahlberg saw the ZeeBlok membranes as the ideal product for wineries, breweries, cideries and fruit processors.
“Basically, it helps clean up dirty water,” he says. “It’s a membrane that you can put into a digester or a pond and you pull a vacuum on the membrane and clean water comes out. It’s very easy because it’s set up so that if you have a tank or some kind of sump you can drop it in.”
Taggart explains that wine and fruit businesses need quality water treatment systems due to the high level of solids and nutrients in the wastewater.
“Fruit/wine/beverage industries produce wastewater that is high in solids,” he says. “ZeeBlok with the ZeeWeed membrane blocks solids from passing through the system. With the high quality treated wastewater, there is less impact to the environment as the ZeeBlok MBR removes solids and enables the WWTP to treat higher BOD and COD levels.”
The ZeeBlok system is based on cassettes so configuration of the system is flexible yet rugged and, as Dahlberg explains, a user can “gang them up” and scale up their treatment system without making massive and expensive changes.
Throughout BC, water use and water treatment is becoming a far greater issue than ever before. Dahlberg sees the future many wineries and fruit processors already predict.
“Regulations in BC are behind what we have to deal with here in California, but I think the BC regulators are taking notes,” he says. “In the Interior, the regulators are getting way more interested in what people are doing.”
An install Dahlberg is aware of in fruit processing is a fruit jam business where wash water is an ongoing issue.
“Wastewater, once it’s been treated with the MBR and these membranes, it makes great irrigation water,” he explains. “You just take untreated wastewater, even from the winery and spread it on the field, it gets pretty smelly. This prevents problems with the neighbours.”