Vegetables - fruits - oils

Fruit and vegetable food production typically requires a large volume of water in order to wash food, sanitize machinery, and an ingredient to their end-products. Sometimes the plants recycle the water several times depending on its use. The volume and the quality of the water from these facilities highly depend on the product and the season.

Wastewater composition:

The process water contains high organic particles, cleaning and disinfecting agents, nutrients, microbes, salt, Suspended Solids (fibers, mud, soil parts,...) and also pesticide residues.

Water usage in the fruit and vegetable processing industry:

Products

Amount of water (l/kg)

Canned fruit

Canned vegetables

Frozen vegetables

Fruit juices

Jam

Baby food

2.5-4.0

3.5-6.0

5.0-8.5

6.5

6.0

6.0-9.0

Data from Pollution Prevention Abatement HandbookWORLD BANK GROUP

Lenntech supplies these kinds of solutions to purify waste water:

(For more information click on one of the diagram fields below)

Vegetable and oil processing:

The oil production involves the mechanical extraction of the crude materials (fruits, nuts or seeds) and the oil processing from vegetables. The different steps of the oil processing are husking, cleaning, crushing and conditioning. The oil processing involves also the solvent use such as hexane.

The issues of the oil processing are the high BOD and COD. That brings about by a high organic content and dissolved solids. For instance, the BOD can be from 20.000 to 35.000 mg/l and the COD from 30.000 up to 60.000 mg/l. In addition you can find oil and fat residues (5.000-10.000mg/l), organic nitrogen (500-800 mg/l) and ashes residues (4.000-5.000 mg/l).

The Lenntech solutions to tackle with these problems:

Basically, we advice using screening and air flotation like a pretreatment to remove fats and solids and after that a biological treatment. Lenntech supply also specific solution for all these following specific issues.

(For more information click on one of the diagram fields below)

As the field of the fruit and vegetable wastewater treatment is huge please directly contact us to know what the best solution is for your problem.

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