Highly efficient drinking water production processes

The quality of drinking water is assessed not only in terms of health but also in terms of taste.

Its taste quality corresponds with high expectations from consumers and local authorities. French users have made it the number one water service assessment criterion, ahead of price.

One of the solutions for improving the taste of water is to reduce the amount of environmental organic materials, which are difficult to eliminate with traditional treatment processes due to their high solubility. The more organic materials there are in water, the higher the microbiological risk and the more necessary the chlorination treatment becomes, organic materials and chlorine jointly deteriorating the taste of water. The more stable the bacteriological quality of water in supply systems, the easier it is to reduce chlorination and therefore its unwanted effects, not only in terms of taste but also with regard to disinfection by-products. The other challenge inherent in water treatment is to control emerging health risks.

Veolia Environnement's research is therefore striving to develop highly efficient drinking water production processes. Within the context of the French national Conference on the Environment, the search for technological efficiency is accompanied by energy and environmental footprint assessment in order to select the most viable processes.

In September 2007, Veolia Environnement inaugurated a 1,000 m² testing hall near the Annet-sur-Marne drinking water plant.

Dedicated to research on highly efficient drinking water treatment processes, it combines twenty pilots used for several research projects. The work carried out on the test platform relates in particular to the removal of organic materials in drinking water in order to give it more stability in the networks as well as constant quality at the tap. It focuses on:

• optimizing nanofiltration and low-pressure reverse osmosis processes;
• testing hybrid membrane processes on an industrial scale;
• comparing the performance of membrane processes and traditional drinking water production processes.