To respond to Unicopa's needs, Veolia Water first developed a report on the pollution impacts of the Carhaix site and devised a wastewater treatment process.
Unicopa is one of France's agro-food co-operative groups.
Unicopa is 18,000 agricultural producers from four businesses: dairy products, deli & cured meat, poultry and animal feed.
The Carhaix site, which employs 250 people, belongs to the Dairy Products branch. It was dedicated to emmental cheese packaging. Since the Unicopa and Entremont Alliance merger, the site has turned to the production of powdered milk and whey.
This production generates two types of wastewater:
Unicopa had signed a discharge agreement with the Carhaix municipality limiting the pollution load discharged into the public wastewater treatment network to five tons of COD/day. However, in light of its activity and self-monitoring results, this discharge threshold was regularly exceeded.
Therefore, the Carhaix site had to install a wastewater pre-treatment plant before discharge into the municipal wastewater treatment plant.
To meet Unicopa's needs, Veolia Water initially carried out a pollution assessment on the Carhaix site and defined a wastewater treatment scheme.
Following this preliminary work, Veolia Water designed and built a pretreatment plant with a 590 m3/d capacity (33,000 ERU), specifically adapted to process the most polluted type of industrial wastewater before discharge into the public network. Wastewater containing low organic loads is discharged to the municipal network without pretreatment.
Technology used: methanization (Biobulk®) with biogas recovery in one of Unicopa's boilers, making it possible to remove 75% of the COD, 85% of the BOD and 68% of SS.
Veolia Water operates the pretreatment plant by methanization and manages biogas production and recovery in one of the client's boilers.
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