This edition of Futuris explores how new technologies can help recycle the water used in chemical plants to make these more environmentally friendly.
Producing chemicals and plastics indeed requires a lot of fresh water to cool down industrial processes, and this water is not always handy.
Our reporter Denis Loctier visited a Dow Benelux plastics plant on the southern coast of the Netherlands. This seaside plant cannot pump water from the ground: it must buy it from a supplier located dozens of kilometers away, uses it once and then pours it out into the sea.
“We need approximately 20 million cubes annually of fresh water. And that’s a bit of a problem here, because the whole area is actually connected to the sea, and all the ground water is brackish or salty, even,” said Niels Groot, water specialist at Dow Benelux.
Salty or dirty water can damage installations, and for now it is cheaper for companies to buy fresh water than to recycle it. A European research project – called
