Igualada tanners to test recycled water service
A specialist operator of wastewater treatment services in Catalonia is to start supplying leather manufacturers in the tanning cluster in Igualada with recycled water for use in production.
Igualadina de Depuració i Recuperació treats wastewater from the local tanneries and also provides water treatment services to some parts of the municipality.
Using equipment that it says is not in place anywhere else in Europe yet, the company will set up what it is calling a water regeneration plant. It will process some of the effluent from tanneries to create two flows of regenerated water that it will return to the leather manufacturing facilities for reuse in production.
One of these flows will deliver water with a high level of purity as a result of osmosis; the other will be saline.
A local technology provider, Waterologies, has developed the equipment that Igualadina de Depuracio i Recuperacio will use for the new service. It has run a successful pilot and generated 10 cubic-metres of purified water and 2 cubic-metres of saline water per day.
The water the pilot exercised has produced is now being subjected to analysis at the University of Lleida’s A3 Leather Innovation Centre in Igualada and a number of tanners have agreed to use it in production trials.
