Water Treatment

Ecover has its own water treatment plant, which purifies all our wastewater using a biological process. During the treatment process, bacteria (in activated sludge) break down the waste materials that enter the wastewater during our production operations.

Each day, wastewater is pumped for several hours into a water purification tank. As Ecover uses readily decomposable, non-toxic raw materials, the decomposition process is rapid and complete.

A daily sedimentation phase during the treatment process allows the bacteria to settle to the bottom of the tank, leaving clean water at the surface that can be pumped off and discharged. A portion of the bacterial mass that grows during the treatment process is also pumped off, dewatered, and pressed into sludge pellets. The sludge pellets are then disposed of separately as organic material that can be processed into organic fuels or soil improvement products.

Each day, around 8000 litres of water are treated and discharged using this process, and around 40 kg of dewatered sludge is produced. The quality of the discharged wastewater is very high – it is comparable to the quality of the water in the streams and rivers of the surrounding area (surface water quality), and in many cases even better.

The water treatment plant achieves a treatment efficiency of better than 99%, which is a remarkably good result for a biological process. That is primarily due to the good degradability of the products used during the production process. Each litre of wastewater contains approximately 300 ml of impurities prior to treatment, which is reduced to approximately 8 ml after treatment.

In this way, each day we eliminate an amount of impurities from our wastewater that is equivalent to the amount of wastewater impurities normally generated each day by around 6600 people.