Episode 67 – Sustainability: Water Reuse and Recycling

Welcome to the TRSA podcast. Providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered, reusable linens, uniforms, towels, mats, and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRSA represents the companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens and uniforms. And in this podcast, we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you.

 

I’m your host, Jason Risley. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Linen, Uniform, and Facility Services podcast, interviews and insights by TRSA. On this podcast, we discuss the sustainability efforts the linen, uniform, and facility services industry has made when it comes to water reuse and water recycling. Joining us on today’s episode is John Shaffer, the CEO and principal chemist for EEC Environmental. He has been providing environmental consulting services to the laundry industry for more than 30 years.

 

John specializes in all things related to industrial wastewater, including permitting, compliance, pretreatment system design, and POTW negotiations. Good morning or good afternoon, everybody. I’m really, really pleased to be able to basically brag about what the laundry industry has done since I’ve been in the laundry industry my whole career. My content will be focusing on water and wastewater in the laundry industry and kind of the state of the industry. Maybe talk about some things that many of you already know, but maybe talk about some things that are not very well known with water and wastewater and and the positives of the laundry industry.

 

So the topics I’ll be covering, are wastewater contaminants. Some of you that some that you are very familiar with, some that maybe have always been a little mysterious to you. You’re talking about wastewater treatment, the typical wastewater treatment in the industry. There’s somebody. There’s a lot of different varieties of treatment, particularly if somebody’s combining treatment with recycling.

 

But I’ll also talk about water reuse, water recycling as opposed to water reuse. I’ll get into the differences between those 2, and then I’ll wrap it up with some industry water and wastewater accomplishments. Some of the typical pollutants that you’ll have in your wastewater permit, some of the concentrations, milligrams per liter, parts per million, same thing for, you know, domestic water versus industrial waste, laundry wastewater versus hospitality and so forth. I’ll get into some of the details on these, but these really are typically the 7 or 8 contaminants that you might have to worry about meeting the compliance limits in your permit. So I’ll break down some of these that I run into all the time, helping a lot of our laundry clients deal with these limits that are in their permits.

 

Fats, oils, and grease is kind of the one that is really the driver for a lot of the laundry wastewater treatment systems. Primary driver limits for fat, soils, and grease are found in most laundry wastewater permits, also buzz other industrial wastewater permits. But fats oils in Greece can be defined a lot of different ways. There’s really no universal way around the country. Sometimes it’s total oil in Greece.

 

Sometimes it’s petroleum oil in Greece. There’s a lot of different definitions, unfortunately, out there. But a little fun fact is that animal fats in Greece, which is obviously a big percentage for anything other than heavy industrial laundries, That’s a big percentage of this total fats, oils, and grease. But animal fats and grease in laundry wastewater is pretty harmless to POTWs. That’s not something that POTWs will tell you.

 

But because we do a lot of consulting for POTWs, we help them with their sewer system blockages and sanitary sewer overflows. We help them with local limits, developing limits in their permits and so forth. It’s really the petroleum oil that is a concern for the treatment plant, the receding waters, and so forth. And the emulsification and laundry wastewater for any animal fats and grease, really, I’m not aware of any grease blockage that’s ever been caused by a laundry. In fact, it would help the surfactants and the high temperature that are being, sent into the sewer would actually help to produce grease blockages from, let’s say, restaurants.

 

And typically animal fats in Greece are very biodegradable at the POTW. So that’s something that really isn’t talked about a whole lot. That is a reality that laundries, whatever number parts per million of fats or grease that is non petroleum is really pretty harmless to most POTWs. The next thing is, you know, BOD, COD suspended solids. These are all what are considered conventional pollutants, which just means that these are things that the treatment plants are designed to treat for.

 

They’re not toxics. They’re not something that’s problematic for POWs as opposed to, let’s say, petroleum oil in Greece or some of the metals. So these are conventional pollutant limits that are really found in far too many laundry wastewater permits. Sewer surcharges for these make total sense. It’s very appropriate.

 

The more, BOD, COD suspended solids, these are basically the the food that is going to be digested by the microorganisms at the wastewater treatment plant and turned into biosolids or sludge. It does make sense that they would charge laundries or any other industry if you’re exceeding the domestic wastewater contributions of these, and it makes sense for you to be charged per pound. What I run into a lot is particularly in smaller cities where, you know, there’s not many industries and a commercial laundry is 1 of 2 or 3 industries. Sometimes they don’t have a sewer surcharge program. They’ve never developed 1.

 

They don’t want to develop 1. They don’t wanna go through the headache of it. And they will actually set a BOD or let’s say suspended solid limit that requires a laundry to put in a wastewater treatment system with it is completely unnecessary. And that’s unfortunate. And so as a consultant, we try to push back on that when we’re hired by laundries that if there’s not a technical basis for these limits, a sewer surcharge is actually very appropriate, but actually causing a laundry to put in a wastewater treatment system simply because of, let’s say, a BOD limit is typically completely inappropriate.

 

So almost all POTWs, fun fact, can handle all the BOD and CODs for laundries. Metals, you know, metals is a legitimate pollutant of concern coming from laundries, you know, in certain concentrations. Every every permit out there has different copper limits, zinc limits, mercury limits, and so forth. And that’s how it should be. But these limits are found in almost every laundry wastewater permit.

 

Sometimes it’s 3 or 4 metals. Sometimes it’s as many as 11 metals. Some metals can cause legitimate issues for POTWs. But a fun fact, which isn’t really fun, is that many metals limits that are in your permits, you don’t know how they were developed. They’re in the ordinance.

 

They might have been developed 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Many of them are not technically based for the current conditions in that city or that wastewater district. So many metals limits that you have that may, you may be struggling with or had to put an extra treatment for, many of them are much more stringent than, than necessary. And that’s just something where you need to push back if you think that a metals limit, particularly those if you have multiple laundries and you see that one of your laundries just has a much, much lower copper limit or lead limit than your other laundries. That may be something that you want to push back on and then challenge the city or the POTW to see if it’s really a technically based limit, particularly if it’s causing you to put in additional treatment.

 

Then pH, almost every laundry, wastewater permit has a pH limit. They’re typically in that 6 to 10 or 6 to 11 range. Most laundries have installed pH adjustment systems to meet these limits historically, but there’s been a lot of developments in low pH washroom chemistry that sometimes makes it no longer necessary. But something that’s a fun fact is that high pH like over 10 is almost never problematic for a PoW either for their sewer system or for their treatment plant. In fact, more alkalinity, more higher pH is actually very beneficial to the sewer system because of all the wastewater that is in the sewer system is typically neutral or below in pH, so it becomes somewhat corrosive.

 

So any alkalinity or high pH that can be added to the sewer system is actually gonna help bring the pH up and lower, you know, less hydrogen sulfide and all kinds of corrosion and so forth. And it’s typically beneficial to the treatment plan as well. So if you see limits that are particularly below 10, but even 10 that are in a wastewater permit, typically that’s a limit that should be higher. And TRSA has done a good job over the years in helping a lot of laundries. It’s something that we as a consultant are hired to do is to push back on unreasonable pH limits because high pH, high alkalinity is actually typically very beneficial to POTWs.

 

Yeah. I just wanna go through some laundry wastewater treatment scenarios. You know, some of you that have multiple plants and different types of treatment systems, this won’t be news to you. But, you know, for many of you, if you haven’t really had to dive into significant treatment at your laundry or laundries, this might be of interest to you. So the basic laundry wastewater pretreatment system, the word pretreatment just means that you’re treating it before you put it in the sewer and that it gets treated by the POW.

 

The typical system for, let’s say, a light soil laundry and when there’s reasonable POTW limits, you know, oil and grease limits and metals limits is maybe you don’t have to do any significant treatment. You’re just basically doing lint removal and pH adjustment, but both of those things are very helpful to the environment. It just reduces the load on the POTW. So even though it’s not a dramatic level of treatment, you’re staying within the pH limits, and you’re removing a lot of lint solids that would become solids for the POTW to have to treat and then haul away a solid. So that’s all very beneficial.

 

The next step, typically in a laundry when they have a permit that they cannot meet those limits just with lint removal and pH adjustment is something like a dissolved air flotation system. And this is a significant capital investment and operating costs and so forth. This is typically for heavy soil laundries and or it could be a light soil laundry or medium soil laundry that has, you know, stringent POTW limits, let’s say for oil and grease. The next would be, membrane or ceramic filtration systems. These become more and more popular over the last 20 years in the industry.

 

This could be basically an either or, you know, do I need to install a dissolved air flotation system to to meet my oil and grease limit, or do I choose to install a membrane ceramic filtration system? The reason why you might lean towards a membrane or ceramic filtration system is if you wanna do a lot of water recycling and not just meet the limits in your permit, or you’re fine. You can meet the limits of your permit without any treatment, but you want to recycle a lot of water regardless of compliance needs. And therefore, you’re gonna move towards something that might be able to get you into that higher water reuse. As opposed to, let’s say, a dissolved air flotation.

 

It’s really difficult to recycle water after a dissolved air flotation system. You kind of have you have basically a guaranteed water quality on the back end of a membrane or ceramic filtration system. So you can do a lot of water recycling. And the next would be something that is found in a, you know, growing percentage of laundries, which is a reverse osmosis system, which is really the next stage after membrane ceramic filtration. You know, this is where you’re getting every contaminant out of the water.

 

You know, it’s getting beyond drinking water quality. And this is where you may be trying to get 70 or 80% recycling. Typically not something you would do simply to get into compliance with it would be overkill to put in reverse osmosis just to meet compliance limits. And then typically, if you’re a heavy soil launder, you would not move towards reverse osmosis. There’s just too many challenges for that type of a treatment.

 

So it’s typically only for light soil laundries who are looking to recycle, you know, let’s say more than 60% of their water. And these are all positives that have been growing in the laundry industries for years that are just reducing the pollutants to the POTWs and that obviously reducing water usage dramatically overall. And these are just examples. This is not something I’ll be going through, you know, box by box, but these are just some process flow diagrams that might be typical for, you know, a light soil laundry that doesn’t have to put in significant treatment. You basically have you know, you may have individual trenches or split trenches and so forth, but, you know, basically a 60 mesh type lint screen, heat exchanger and so forth.

 

And then maybe some pH adjustment where you don’t really have this wastewater treatment significant wastewater treatment room in the back of your plant and so forth. So you see the top right corner is empty there. So that’d be kind of a typical of a a light soil, laundry that doesn’t have to put in treatment to meet the, the limits of the permit beyond, let’s say, pH. Here be an example of a process flow diagram for the same laundry, but, you know, for whatever reason, either because they took in different types of soil loading or the wastewater, permit limits became much more stringent, between one permit and the next. And now they’ve got to put in significant treatment, let’s say, for a new oil and grease limit, and so they’ll put in dissolved air flotation.

 

So this just kinda gives you an idea. There’s, you know, quite a few tanks and so forth, and then there’s chemicals, then there’s sludge and everything else, coagulants and flocculants, and then sludge that has to be dewatered. It’s a pretty significant operation. Now you’re talking about an operator, a part time operator typically that’s gonna have to run the system, become knowledgeable on how to do what they call our jar tests to kinda make sure that the the chemicals are being added at the correct concentrations every day or a couple times a day. So that’s pretty significant investment.

 

A lot more laundries over the years have put in these systems. The DAS have gotten better and better over the years, smaller footprints, more efficient, better solids removal, and everything else. There’s been better solids, dewatering, sludge dewatering systems that have been developed. So this is a huge benefit to the environment, to the POTW, a lot less oil and grease and suspended solids and so forth and and metals. A lot of metals are removed with DAF treatment, even if it’s primarily designed for oil and grease and suspended solids removal.

 

You’ll typically get, you know, 70% plus removals for the metals as well. So this is all very beneficial. So that’s just a lot less pollutants going down to the sewer, going to the POTW. And it’s just an overall positive benefit to the environment that the laundry industry has just continued to add more and more of these systems. And then there’s a lot of examples under what I would call laundry 3.

 

And this is a laundry that for either has extremely stringent wastewater discharge standards. This is something that will probably become more common with PFAS when PFAS limits hit the industry is advanced treatment with membranes and maybe all the way up to RO. In some cases, hopefully, many laundries won’t have to go all the way to RO to meet any limits in the future. But I just have a lot of different examples here of boxes on a process flow diagram. This might be more representative of what’s happening now at a laundry that’s doing, you know, 80% recycling, something like that, because their water bills are so high or they really just wanna be very green.

 

I was just talking to a laundry yesterday that might be attending this conference in Canada. That’s that’s recycling 75, 80% of their water. And they’re still trying to figure out ways they can do more to to help the environment. So it’s very, you know, it’s not just to save money. It’s very green driven, which is, you know, that’s great when a laundry can combine water savings with also reducing the load to the environment as well.

 

So here I just wanted to summarize some water reuse and, water recycling fun facts, interesting information. So water reuse, those two terms are often used the same way. But if you wanna if you wanna separate them, I think it’s beneficial to separate them. Water reuse is really where you’re not putting in a significant treatment system or water recycling system. You’re not putting in membranes and so forth.

 

And this is where you’re just having split trenches and split drains below the machines, and you are trying to benefit from the fact that you have pretty clean water in your final rinses that can be recirculated back into the early parts of other formulas. Tunnel washers, that’s basically what they’re doing throughout their whole process is they’re taking water and moving it back up to the front of the formula. And it’s just tremendous, you know, opportunities for for just water savings without putting in, significant treatment. So some laundries and tunnel washers, those are just designed with this water reuse capability within them. But some laundries, even without tunnels, can achieve up to 30%, you know, water savings, you know, with just these split trenches and split drains and so forth.

 

And, you know, obviously, you’ve got to make sure that your hot water systems are are designed appropriately and and tempered water systems, everything else. But it’s very doable, particularly if you’re starting with a new laundry or there’s ways that you can split trenches below certain machines to upgrade an existing laundry that doesn’t have that. You don’t have to split trench your whole washroom. Now water recycling is really the more common thing that we’re seeing in the laundry industry over the last 20 years. And that’s because of the development of these really effective, you know, particularly ceramic filtration systems where you’re recycling treated water.

 

Again, not typically out of the back end of a of a DAF or or DAF, particularly at the back end of a filtration system, whether it’s a membrane or ceramic type systems. And you might be able to see 40 to 65, maybe as high as 75%, water recycling. Now that’s a little unusual to get to those kinds of levels typically, so that 40 to 65% recycling. So you’re basically recycling treated water back in to formulas. You know, you can have dual drain washers and segregated trenches to make this even more efficient where, let’s say, your most contaminated water, which is often called black water, let’s say, from your heaviest soil formulas, you wanna make sure that doesn’t get sent to the membranes because it might cause a lot of headaches for the membranes and a lot of, you know, cleaning of the membranes and maybe shortening shortening the life of the membranes.

 

If you wanna keep your highest, oiliest contaminated wastewater away from the system, that’s where you might have dual drains and dual drain washers and segregated trenches just on a few of your washers to keep that to basically protect your recycling system. But one fun fact is if you decide that you have to put in these advanced treatment systems, you have to put them in for compliance purposes. If that’s the reason why you’re putting it in. Let’s say you’re trying to decide between a DAF or a ceramic filtration system, and both of them will meet your oil and grease limits or your lead limit or what have you. And you’re trying to decide, well, think about if you’re going to be putting that significant capital investment into a treatment system, does one or the other provide you the opportunity to recycle a lot of water?

 

What’s your water bill? You know, basically do a cost benefit analysis to see that if you have to treat with these expensive systems, you might as well look to see if you can recycle a significant percentage of your water. So I just wanna wrap it up with some laundry industry water and wastewater accomplishments. The first one I think is very significant. I’ve been in the laundry industry for over 30 years.

 

I’ve seen these water savings just get better and better and better for a lot of different reasons. You know, not the chemistry in the washroom, for example, just lower, less and less water usage in formulas because of the surfactants used in the formulations. But this is focused on just the water use and recycling systems that have become more common in the industry over the last 20 years. The the water use has gone from around 2.16 gallons per pound in 2000 to 1.43 gallons per pound, you know, in the last couple of years. That’s that’s a really significant water savings, particularly since there was a lot of effort prior to 2000 to bring down the water usage in the laundry industry.

 

So there was already a lot done before the year 2000. But so, you know, once you get to 1.4 gallons per pound, you are really it’s tough to get any lower than that. So that’s that’s really a a significant accomplishment for the laundry industry. A lot of people don’t know this fun fact unless they’ve been in the laundry industry for a while that they the laundry industry was the 1st industry to have a federal categorical standard withdrawn by the EPA in 1999. I won’t go into the whole thing about that.

 

But basically, you know, metal finishers, refineries, pulp and paper plants, they all have these federal categorical limits that are difficult to meet in their permits because they discharge too many toxics that PO2W is just simply can’t treat well enough. And the laundry industry was considered one of those industries that was proposed by the EPA to need federal categorical standards, lower oil and grease limits and metals limits and so forth, that would have been the same limits for every single laundry in the country. And the laundry industry put up a very strong technically based defense, UTSA and TRSA, and then a really great letter from LA County Sanitation District. I was involved in this effort back then. Really made the argument that laundry is the typical commercial laundry does not discharge high levels of toxics that are problematic for POTWs.

 

And there’s almost no laundries in the country that directly discharge to receiving water. So this was a huge kind of recognition that the laundry industry is not in that tier 1 of, you know, hard industries that just discharge too many toxics. And that’s been, you know, the EPA has never come back since then to propose again that there needs to be federal limits on the laundry industry. That may change with something like PFAS, but at least, you know, to this point, nothing like that’s happened. The laundry industry, when nonylphenol ethoxylates, were found to be more toxic than first believed, The laundry industry made a really strong effort to voluntarily remove nonylphenol ethoxylates from surfactant formulations and so forth.

 

I have it in this presentation because, you know, that is a contaminant. The certain surfactants are themselves contaminants if they’re considered too toxic phosphates as well. So that was washroom formulation, changes that really did a lot that that made their way into the wastewater that just by changes in the washroom chemistry have been a huge benefit to POTWs and the environment because laundries were looked at as significant sources of, NPE and phosphates prior to these changes. And then these robust wastewater treatment technologies that we’re talking about, the laundry issues coming up with better and better, ceramic systems and you know, all types of it. Now RO, RO was not even talked about, you know, 15 years ago in the laundry industry to recycle water, and now it’s becoming more common reverse osmosis.

 

So those are that that’s just gonna continue to climb because more and more water and wastewater costs are so high that it starts to justify regardless of how green a laundry wants to be, just the water and wastewater costs have started to justify these, these high capital investments and operating costs. So, you know, sometimes laundries are forced into that just for economic reasons. But again, it’s a big benefit to the industry, be a big benefit to the environment and to POTWs. And then the last little fun fact is going back to these categorical standards that were with John in 1999. Our company works with a lot of POTWs around the country.

 

We help them develop their pretreatment programs. We always try to help them come up with business friendly ways of regulating their industries. That’s just that they know that when they hire us, that we’re going to be helping them with limits that are not gonna be too burdensome on their industries because they know we’d work for a lot of industries. And in reality, laundry’s, PO tables are typically pretty happy when a commercial laundry comes into town because, you know, these are high flow dischargers that can get surcharge revenue and so forth, but they aren’t metal finishers. You know, you’re you’re not the types of industries that they’re nervous about.

 

You pretty much discharge pretty harmless wastewater as long as they can pass, you know, reasonable limits and so forth. Again, the pH that comes from laundries is a desired pH, not a negative. The suspended solids is a reasonable level of suspended solids, the BOD. Many POTWs need that BOD in order to operate properly. So anyway, POTWs actually are pretty fond of commercial laundries.

 

And and the commercial laundry industry, I think, has been very good in the way that they have been good citizens and good discharges overall to PODWs. So that’s that’s nice, you know, for somebody who’s a laundry kid, somebody who grew up into the industry and so forth. When I work with POTWs, it’s always a nice conversation to talk about how are we gonna regulate that laundry. They’re much more nervous about many other industries than laundries. Today’s episode featured an excerpt from a presentation titled communicating the green impacts of linen in uniform service, which also featured TRSA’s own Ken Kupper.

 

To listen to the full presentation, visit TRSA’s on demand learning center at www. Trsa.org/ on demand. Thanks again for tuning in. And if you liked what you heard on today’s show, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Itunes and Google Podcasts. For the latest news and information from the linen uniform and facility services industry, subscribe to our newsletter, Textile Services Weekly, and our monthly print publication, Textile Services Magazine.

 

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