IDR launches tertiary treatment of wastewater

On Friday 19 September a celebration event was held at the tanners’ water treatment plant to mark the 20th anniversary of the collaboration between Tradebe, an international company leading the management of industrial waste and specialising in recycling and energy recovery, and IDR (Societat Igualadina de Depuració i Recuperació S.L).

This collaboration took shape with the commissioning of the industrial wastewater treatment plant on Ronda del Rec, known as the tanners’ treatment plant, owned by IDR and managed by Tradebe. At the same time, Tradebe invested in a plant for treating the sludge generated at the tanners’ treatment plant.

After twenty years of operation, IDR’s treatment plant, one of the pioneering plants in Europe in the treatment of industrial wastewater, has become a benchmark for the water industry.

Over these years, the plant, which each day treats the water generated in the leather transformation process by the Igualada tanneries belonging to Leather Cluster Barcelona along with that of other industries, has been visited by technicians and sustainability professionals from more than 30 different countries. The good practice developed over the past 20 years in Igualada in water management and treatment, the fruit of the collaboration between Tradebe and IDR, has been a case study at a seminar of the United Nations Environment Programme, at an international session for advisers and professionals of the Ministry of the Environment, and the subject of a feature in the magazine Global Water Intelligence, a leading publication for the water industry.

Recently, Tradebe, a company with a global presence leading the treatment of industrial waste, has taken a further step in its cooperation with IDR, with a significant investment in Jorba, remodelling the existing facilities in order to improve the quality of the treated sludge, which makes it possible to meet the most demanding environmental standards.

During the celebration event, those attending were informed that Igualadina de Depuració i Recuperació (IDR) is launching tertiary treatment of its wastewater at the tanners’ treatment plant. In other words, an additional treatment phase after the primary and secondary treatments.

This tertiary process consists mainly of a homogenising tank, a flocculator and a dissolved air flotation unit (DAF), to treat all the water from the treatment plant.

Thanks to the effort put into water treatment over these 20 years, the tanners have returned the water they have used to the environment in optimum condition. Tertiary treatment is a further step that makes it possible to discharge the water in even better condition and to comply with all the required legal parameters by a wide margin.

Within Leather Cluster Barcelona’s strategic lines of action, with zero waste on the horizon and in order to champion the leather industry as a benchmark for the circular economy, since 2020 IDR has been working on the Resalt project, whose purpose is to regenerate the water coming from the treatment plant so that it can be reused within the industry itself, with an initial objective of recovering 50% of the water for industry.

Work has been carried out at two pilot plants and a high degree of expertise in the operation of membranes has been achieved. Last year, investment was made in a semi-industrial ultrafiltration membrane plant that already generates 50 m3 a day of ultrafiltered water, which is used at the plant itself and serves as pilot water for tanneries to test in some of their processes in order to validate its performance.

This first phase of the Resalt project has involved an investment of 1.5 million euros and has produced very good results: water in optimum condition to move on to the second phase, the membranes, which are the heart of the Water Regeneration Station.

Leather Cluster Barcelona is an environment of competitive cooperation for promoting cross-cutting, transformative strategic projects with the aim of driving forward the ecosystem of the Catalan leather sector within the framework of Shared Value policies. The cluster is an accredited body within the Catalonia Clusters programme and has the support of Acció.