Effluent Treatment System Increased At Worlds Third Largest Ice Cream Manufacture

R&R Ice Cream, the World’s third largest ice cream manufacturer, has completed a four year, £25 million investment programme at its Leeming Bar factory in North Yorkshire which includes an on-site effluent treatment system, designed, built and commissioned by filtration specialists, Axium Process.

The investment programme helped R&R to increase its production capability at the site by more than 20% and meant that the capacity of Axium’s on-site effluent treatment plant had to be increased from 600,000 litres to 1.5 million litres per day.

The effluent treatment plant was expanded with very little disruption to R&R’s daily production and uses primarily both Ultrafiltration (UF) and double pass Reverse Osmosis (RO) separating technology.

The 2.5 fold expansion scope of supply also incorporated fully automated additional processes designed, installed and commissioned by Axium Process to further enhance the quality and condition of the raw effluent entering the membrane system; removable sump debris catcher, aeration and mixing of large effluent holding tanks, triplex liquid solid separator pre-filtration, vertical shell  and tube pasteurizers system (powered using excess heat from an onsite CHP plant), temperature controlled air cooling system and a pH adjustment tank were all new additions to the plant and located on the same size foot print as the old plant.

The superior quality conditioned raw effluent is now passed through the four UF skids, with the UF permeate passed through a pair of double stage, double pass RO’s to recycle 90% of the effluent received to clean water for reuse back in the factory.

The 10% concentrated waste from the UF/RO batch process is retained and transported to an anaerobic digester where it is used to produce bio-methane.

Axium Process specialises in the design, fabrication, testing and commissioning of customised membrane filtration systems for the concentration and separation of liquid streams utilising microfiltration ultrafiltration, nanofiltration and reverse osmosis technologies.