UK-based LAT Water has developed a groundbreaking treatment for industrial and landfill wastewater known as leachate, which it claims is both environmentally friendly and cuts operating costs by almost half.
The process, called Low temperature Ambient pressure Technology, or LAT for short, separates and recovers clean water from highly contaminated industrial water utilising waste heat.
LAT Water and recycling and waste management company Viridor jointly applied for a £548,000 (€471,000) grant through the UK government’s Industrial Energy Efficiency Accelerator. After the application was successful, the company launched a pilot project to treat leachate from Viridor’s Broadpath landfill site near Exeter.
Read more: New ABB partnership to help tackle Egypt's water shortages
After six months, the pilot has demonstrated a 48% reduction in operating costs and a 70% reduction in energy usage. Now commercially available, LAT could prove to be a gamechanger for the way local councils and landfill operators manage leachate.
Leachate is one of the most difficult industrial waste effluents to treat. Existing global leachate treatment technologies are often energy-intensive processes that produce a lot of emissions.
The treatment piloted by LAT poses a challenge to the traditional leachate treatment processes: Reverse Osmosis – membrane-type solutions that cannot effectively operate beyond moderate water recovery levels (little beyond 50%), and Thermal Boiling Solutions that use boiling water techniques and pressure vessels to treat leachate.
To date, most research in the field has focused on incremental improvements in base technologies rather than seeking a step-change in the treatment of leachate, both in landfill and across other water-intensive processes. LAT says that its treatment can return up to 90% of water to be reused and/or recycled, onsite and at new levels of efficiency.
Viridor, Broad Path, UK
The pilot project took place at the Viridor operated landfill site in Devon, UK.
Read more: Doosan wins sewage treatment contract in the UK
Mark Hardiman, CEO of LAT Water said: “We’ve been running the pilot at a 10 m3/day demonstration trial for six months at Viridor’s Broadpath landfill site in Devon and the results speak for themselves."
"We have also been operating a 120 m3/d LAT in China for the past eighteen months, so we know that LAT is scalable. We’re now making LAT available to all landfill operators and local councils across the UK on a lease basis, which reduces the CAPEX hurdle and shortens the ROI."
The LAT process makes use of waste heat which would otherwise be discharged into the environment, as the key energy source to drive the process. Combined with the reduction in diesel fuel used by reducing the number of tanker movements, and more energy efficient separation technology, the process is set to shake up the wastewater management sector as a whole.
Back to Homepage
Back to Energy & Utilities