Elga Process Water's regeneration station has regenerated more than a million litres of ion exchange resin for its cylinder exchange service
In the three years since the regeneration station was built, as part of a £5m investment in the company's Stoke-on-Trent facility, it has also regenerated two million litres of resin for the Aquamove fleet of trailer mounted mobile treatment plants.
Although this means an average of a million litres of resin every year, it's well within the design capacity of the regeneration station and capability for a market that is still growing.
Cylinder exchange is a very convenient means of producing high purity water.
The cylinder containing mixed bed ion exchange resins is simply connected to the water supply, and the resin removes dissolved impurities to produce high quality water at the turn of a tap.
When it's exhausted it is returned to Elga Process Water in exchange for a recharged cylinder.
This means that the user doesn't have to worry about handling hazardous chemicals or disposing of regeneration wastes, but he still has a duty of care to know the resin's eventual fate and to ensure that it complies with legislation.
Many suppliers of exchange cylinders simply dispose of the spent resin to landfill along with any contaminants removed from the water.
Given that ion exchange resins are manufactured from polystyrene, this option is neither sustainable nor environmentally friendly.
Elga Process Water regenerates the resins for re-use.
The fully automatic resin regeneration facility handles the regenerant chemicals and monitors the wastewater produced in the process in accordance with Elga Process Water's ISO14001 aligned environmental management system.
Quality is, of course, just as important in its product and Elga Process Water's ISO9001 quality system is there to ensure that quality is maintained.
Each regenerated batch of resin undergoes detailed quality control laboratory tests to ensure that it complies with Elga Process Water's stringent standards.
Once the cylinders are loaded with resin they are bar coded so that the resin batch from which they were filled and the exact regeneration conditions can be traced.
Elga Process Water operates its own fleet of trucks for delivery and collection of cylinders, so traceability extends to the time of delivery and even the driver's name.
This level of traceability is more than just obsessive attention to detail: to many of Elga Process Water's customers like pharmaceutical manufacturers, food producers and scientific research establishments it is a prime requirement for their own quality systems.
So whether your needs are for five litres of resin in Elga Process Water's smallest exchange cylinder or 15,000 litres in an Aquamove mobile plant, you know that the attention to quality at the regeneration station means that it's every bit as reliable as the previous million litres were and the next million litres will be, the company says.
