EDITORS PICKS
works. Thereby allowing more flow to a treatment works rather than diversion to rivers and streams during high flow rain events.
Headquartered in Yorkshire, ACWA Services has been delivering specialist wastewater treatment services in the UK and globally for nearly 40 years. The company is the exclusive agent of Nuvoda’s MOB patented technology in the UK and Ireland, which is already installed in numerous full-scale municipal and industrial installations across Europe and North America.
plant can experience washout of the microorganisms essential to the biological processes. These exit the works due to the high hydraulic load and the recovery time for processes can be days and even weeks.
With ACWA-Nuvoda MOB, those organisms are retained as thick biofilm growth on the plant-based biomedia, and regenerated within the system, delivering increased treatment capacity and shortening recovery time to hours.
The kenaf plant is a multi-purpose regenerative fibre that has historically been used in the production of rope, building materials and animal feed. It has been selected and specifically machined as the biomedia for MOB because of its absorptivity, high surface area, unique cellular structure and longevity in secondary treatment conditions.
The biomedia is retained within the system using a rotary drum screen installed on the surplus activated sludge line. Screened media is simply returned to the bioreactor, making the process nearly 100% efficient, with very little top-up required.
Reduced costs
Along with nutrient removal, MOB ensures improved settling and optimised process stability, even during fluctuating weather conditions. It reduces the need for polymers, coagulants and phosphorus precipitation technologies, reducing overall capital and chemical cost. It also improves sludge dewatering, significantly reducing tankering requirements.
For the many existing ASP treatment 44
works with little room for expansion, MOB offers a solution. Mobile Organic Biofilm is a ‘no-build’ solution that can be introduced into existing systems, offering significant capital savings and no extra land-take.
Spill Mitigation
MOB offers facilities an opportunity for spill mitigation by increasing the available hydraulic capacity of an existing treatment
The scale and potential cost of investment required to meet the latest UK targets on environmental discharges means enhanced treatment has a significant role to play. This requires an interrogation of what ‘nature-based’ means, and which solutions can be delivered rapidly and reliably.
Where site footprint is tight, pollution risk is high and public pressure is on, readily available technologies like MOB are already delivering highly efficient, sustainable treatment; with some of the UK’s most progressive utilities already on board.
Safe digging best practice: Water industry making slow progress
Fionn Wardrop, Head of Business Development at LSBUD, the UK’s leading online safe digging resource, talks to us about why the water industry is a contradiction when it comes to safe digging, keeping people safe, yet not protecting their own networks from third party strikes.
The Current State of Play
The UK’s water industry is proving to be an enigma when it comes to best safe digging practice. Despite having the largest network of utility assets, with over 400,000 kilometres of underground pipes across the UK, some water companies are still hesitant to protect their own infrastructure by sharing asset
| October 2024 |
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information through a central collaborative portal.
Given that disruptions to water service can cripple businesses, leave homes without clean running water, and even impact critical services like hospitals and schools, this reticence to protect the pipelines is surprising. There is also the financial and reputational implications for the water companies themselves, plus any third party damage to pipes can create pathways for contaminants to enter the water supply, posing a serious health risk.
Even though we know the ramifications of not protecting our pipes from third party damages, there are still huge parts of the UK’s water pipeline network that are poorly protected. The pressure has been
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