Many industrial wastewaters contain dissolved metals as a result of materials and chemicals used in the manufacturing processes.  In response to concerns for the overall health of the environment, regulatory bodies across the world continue to decrease the allowed discharge limits for many regulated contaminants such as mercury, lead, cadmium, nickel, zinc, copper and chromium.  As a result of these decreasing standards many existing technologies used to polish industrial wastewater can no longer achieve the standards required in discharge permit limits.  

Ion exchange has historically been a proven technology to achieve these lower standards but in most cases has difficulty to achieve levels below 25ppb depending on the contaminant and chemistry of the wastewater.  With many industries facing new, stricter discharge levels Siemens has developed new adsorbent products to achieve these decreasing standards.  This new class of adsorbents can routinely achieve levels below 1ppb for most metals and specifically for mercury can achieve levels below 12ppt, the standard for discharge into lakes and rivers within the United States.   

Siemens’ SCU specialty media has helped customers in a diverse range of industries to achieve these lower standards when faced with reduced regulatory limits.  Siemens Water Technologies offers temporary and permanent service based treatment alternatives to provide an integrated solution specifically tailored to each application.  Service exchange provides the ultimate flexibility to add or remove treatment capacity as your business grows or compliance limits change.  If needs change, systems are simply modified to adjust the size or media type to quickly adapt to the process needs. 

Once exhausted media is transferred to Siemens RCRA licensed central treatment and processing facility where the both non-hazardous and hazardous wastes are treated in compliance with all state and federal guidelines and valuable metals are recycled into raw materials when possible.