Industrial wastewater needs to be treated with an industrial wastewater management system before discharge via sewer system or other route. Wastewater system operation and maintenance (O&M) is a complex process yet one that is pivotal to facility compliance and effective pre-environmental discharge wastewater treatment.
Properly operating a wastewater management system in accordance with federal, state, and local regulations includes many requirements.
What is industrial wastewater?
Industrial wastewater is a product or byproduct of many industrial and commercial processes. It is separate from domestic sources of wastewater. This type of wastewater includes runoff and leachate from areas that receive pollutants associated with industrial or commercial storage, handling, or processing facilities.
Why is industrial wastewater system management important?
An industrial wastewater system helps process and treat industrial wastewater to a point where it is safe and compliant for discharge into the environment. If industrial wastewater system management and maintenance is not performed, these crucial treatment and processing steps may not occur and the discharging organization could be noncompliant and unsafe.
What industrial wastewater treatment processes do I need to perform?
The industrial wastewater treatment processes your facility needs to perform depend on the pollutants within your wastewater. Among others, you may need to perform physical treatment with filtrations, screening, and other sludge handling techniques or chemical treatment for pH adjustment, ion exchange, flocculation, or coagulation.
Steps for Industrial Wastewater System Management and Maintenance
Proper industrial wastewater system management involves remaining compliant with relevant federal, state, and local regulations. These regulations are complex, which in turn makes balancing the necessary steps complex.
Below, we’ve simplified the elaborate world of industrial wastewater system management into five areas that you should pay particular attention to so that your system operates within compliance and to its full potential:
1. Permits and Regulatory Obligations
Are your industrial wastewater permits, plans, and compliance obligations submitted, up-to-date, and in order?
The first step to industrial wastewater system compliance is communicating with your local sewer and/or environmental authority about your plans to discharge industrial wastewater. When you call, ask specifically for the “Industrial Pre-Treatment Program Coordinator,” someone who oversees compliance with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Pre-Treatment Program. The local authority may require that you submit a permit application or notice of intent (NOI) that typically describes the sources, characteristics, and volumetric flow of your industrial wastewater discharge. The NOI also identifies other chemicals in use at your facility.
For any wastewater treatment processes required of your facility, an O&M manual will need to be created and regularly updated. This manual should include:
- A high-level description of your equipment and how it is designed to work
- Guidelines to start-up the system
- Standard operating procedures (SOPs)
- Emergency response instructions
- Operator staffing plans
- System operation record
Properly maintaining this manual (including all plans and logs) proves to the permitting authority that you keep your facility in good operating condition and that compliance with your permit is important to you. These records can also serve as supporting data for proper operation and validation for replacement for or upgrades of the system.
Your permit may require periodic compliance sampling and laboratory analysis, and often requires reporting to your local wastewater authority and/or state environmental department. You may also be required to submit other deliverables, such as pH and flow record logs or other records of daily-documented parameters.
Read any issued permit carefully. If you have comments on, questions about, or disputes of the permit requirements, you will often have the opportunity to respond to the authority.
2. Characteristics of Wastewater
Do you have a proven record of all characteristics of your industrial wastewater?
Industrial wastewater system management requires regular review of any chemical hygiene plans or procedures to verify what is kept onsite and how it is handled. As part of this, any EHS professional should regularly interview facility personnel to ensure that plans are being followed; Ensure prompt adjustments when discrepancies are discovered so they don’t become a larger problem in the future. As a waste generator, you know the processes that produce waste within your operations. As such, industrial wastewater system management also requires regular review of the products and reagents that are combined within wastewater streams.
Once you have a handle on the character and variability of your generated wastewater, you can design your treatment system and/or develop protocols to ensure continuous and compliant operation. If you have the opportunity to run a scaled-down treatability study (a.k.a. a “bench test”), you should do so. Even if performed on a small scale, it can head off pitfalls that could lead to substantial rework of your plans.
3. Quantity and Origin
How much wastewater does your facility generate for treatment and where is it generated?
The next step of industrial wastewater system management is to determine the quantity of generated wastewater and how it originates.
You need to know the precise source of pollutants in your wastewater so you can work to divert pollutants at the point of generation and keep wastewater compliant. This may involve sampling along various points of the waste drainage system. Similarly, when a new process is brought online, you must be involved in the early planning stages to determine what waste, if any, will contribute to the wastewater discharge so you can plan for full compliance. Review any relevant material safety data sheets (MSDSs) for products used throughout the facility and run some sample analyses on the waste to confirm whether it poses discharge compliance concerns. Keep in mind that adding new sources to an existing wastewater discharge may require submitting further documentation—when in doubt, check with your contact at the regulatory authority.
When a waste stream has the potential to cause discharge compliance violations, collect offending waste in carboys instead of sending it down the drain. This can offer significant cost savings over adding wastewater treatment processes of continuing to receive compliance violations (and the “bad press” that goes with them).
*Remember: If your facility has received wastewater discharge violations, whether related to volume, certain pollutants, or color, you are responsible for returning to compliance.
4. Flow Measurement
Does the wastewater flow balance with known facility operations, or are you treating more than is necessary?
As a wastewater operator and/or compliance manager, you must be familiar with the balance of how much water flows into your facility and how much leaves. If the input does not equal the output, the source of these discrepancies needs to be identified. For example, did you factor in cooling tower evaporation or irrigation uses?
Accurate flow measurement is important for several reasons. Flow rate is arguably the most critical factor when calculating the capacity of your wastewater treatment system (and subsequent industrial wastewater system maintenance and management). Without an accurate flow measurement, you’ll be in a perpetual battle trying to ensure that all of your wastewater is fully treated without pumping too much industrial wastewater system maintenance into it. Any upset to the balance could mean you’ll have a major clean-up or compliance problem on your hands. Not only that, but strictly from a regulatory perspective, almost all discharge permits will require you to measure wastewater flow.
How can I measure flow rate for industrial wastewater system maintenance?
Flow rate can be measured by many different methods and types of equipment and regularly utilize meters. Some meters such as magnetic, paddlewheel, and turbine ones require full-pipe (closed channel) flow, and often have a minimum flow rate that they can register accurately; These don’t work well for very low flow applications. Flumes and weirs are suited for partially filled pipes (open-channel) and can read accurately across large ranges, including at zero or just above. Choosing the correct equipment to measure your flow is critical to collecting accurate and useful data.
5. Operator Responsibilities
What are the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks of your wastewater operators?
Industrial wastewater system maintenance often falls to wastewater system operators. Again, this depends on your system, but many common tasks apply to most operators.
In terms of equipment maintenance, operators are responsible for managing pumps, probes, filtration equipment, software and firmware updates to automated systems, general housekeeping, testing alarms, and any other tasks to keep a safe and orderly facility.
Operators must also report any spills and/or abnormal operation. If any plans exist to change operations, significantly modify and/or replace equipment, or change flow, operators must initiate the proper notification chain (which may also include the regulatory authority.) As a good practice for notification, when in doubt, check your permit requirements and call the regulatory authority. If you outsource industrial wastewater system maintenance, your vendor can facilitate notification.
Wastewater operators must also maintain their own licensure in good standing and be sure that they receive necessary training credit hours. These credits may go by names such as CEUs, ECHs, TCHs, CECs, PDHs, etc., depending on the terms your state licensing or certification board uses. No matter the name of the credits, plans should be put in place to avoid last-minute training and license renewal needs—planning early and regular review helps keep all systems operational.
Getting Started With Industrial Wastewater System Management
If your facility discharges industrial wastewater, it is imperative to use industrial wastewater system management practices to achieve compliance with the various local, state, and federal regulations. Click below to learn more about how Triumvirate Environmental can help you with this daunting—but important—task.
