H2O GmbH joined the Blue Competence sustainability initiative.
Sustainability is the hot topic of our time. In a world of dwindling natural resources, taking environmental responsibility is absolutely essential.
That's why the German Engineering Association (VDMA) launched the Blue Competence sustainability initiative. Since its launch in early 2011, around 400 partners from the European mechanical engineering industry have joined the network, and H2O GmbH from Germany is now among them.
H2O GmbH qualified as a partner of the initiative by actively implementing sustainability in the company and its products. The pass mark for the qualification as a partner is 190 points: H2O has even reached 300.
The following criteria were met:
- The partner has defined objectives for its products and personnel that involve sustainable actions.
- The construction guidelines include sustainable criteria that apply to every phase of the product's lifecycle.
- The product documentation describes resource-conserving operational aspects and the precautions for products to ensure their resource efficiency.
- The partner's service offering includes professional consulting on energy efficiency/resource conservation during day-to-day use of the product.
- The partner has declared its willingness to quantify the sustainability/sustainable effectiveness of its company/products, at least by way of a sample case. This/these sample case(s) can also be used by the participant as part of the Blue Competence campaign.
- The partner maintains a management system that also sets and monitors sustainable objectives in addition to quality objectives and criteria. The continuous improvement process (CIP) is part of this management system and also covers sustainability objectives.
- The issue of "sustainability" is assigned to a person in the company management for the partner and its products.
For a clean environment: VACUDEST enables the zero liquid discharge production
Global fresh water resources are becoming increasingly scarce, yet pollution in open waters continues to this day. The disposal of wastewater in many industries is a major problem for the environment. That's why H2O GmbH pursues the vision to achieve zero liquid discharge in industrial production so that future generations can live in a clean environment.
Industrial wastewater consists of only a very small proportion of waste materials such as oils, fats and heavy metals. The water content is often more than 99 per cent. The task of the VACUDEST vacuum distillation systems from H2O GmbH is to separate this water from the impurities in as pure a form as possible. To do so, the system uses the principle of evaporation. The evaporation process makes the separated water so clean that it can be reused for high-grade surface finishing processes as in vehicle, furniture and window production. This saves an enormous amount of fresh water.
The impurities contained in the wastewater are concentrated in the evaporation residue and further processed by waste management facilities. This prevents pollutants from entering into the waters or the public sewer system. The result is zero liquid discharge in industrial production. Over 1,200 industrial productions around the world already take advantage of these benefits.
Energy issues
Saving energy is one of the most important measures in tackling the environmental problems we face. It reduces operating costs and improves the carbon balance. Therefore H2O relies consistently on the process of direct vapour recompression to evaporate industrial wastewater since more than 25 years. Integrated energy recycling directs the heat of the steam back into the system. This reduces energy consumption by 95 per cent in comparison with atmospheric evaporation.
The individual components of the VACUDEST vacuum distillation systems are perfectly matched to one another. It was possible to reduce the energy consumption of a VACUDEST system by 28 per cent in the past ten years thanks to this perfect interplay and the technologies developed by H2O.
Zero liquid discharge
Vacuum evaporators have established themselves on the market as the most economical method of processing industrial wastewater and offer a real alternative to disposal and other processing methods. This form of water recycling allows productions to significantly reduce costs. In the case of larger systems, this can mean financial savings of several million euros within the space of ten years. It is not just the environment that benefits; industrial companies also benefit from efficient processes and systems.
For further information: www.wastewater-evaporator-h2o.com