Brewery wastewater could be used for bio-fuel
The findings of this study are important because although the brewing industry is essential for the South African economy, brewing requires a lot of water.
AS water continues to be a scarce resource globally, and the energy crisis strengthens its grip in South Africa, researchers are trying to find environmentally friendly ways of extracting the full benefits of the resources that we already have.
The study recently conducted by researchers from Mangosuthu University of Technolgy (MUT) and Durban University of Technology (DUT) revealed that brewery wastewater has the potential to be turned into bioenergy – using anaerobic technology – because of its high organic strength.
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This study, which was conducted at a brewery facility in Durban, was co-authored by MUT’s acting dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Professor Babatunde Bakare, with DUT’s professors Sudesh Rathilal, Siphesihle Mangena Khumalo and Emmanuel Kweinor Tetteh. The title of the study published in the journal of Water is Characterisation of South African Brewery Wastewater: Oxidation-Reduction Potential Variation.
According to the study, the findings of this study are important because although the brewing industry is essential for the South African economy, brewing requires a lot of water.
The study explains: “Generally, brewing of beer requires substantial amounts of water: To make 1m cubed of beer, a volume of wastewater of 10–20m cubed is produced. The brewing process includes malting, mashing, wort filtering, wort boiling, fermentation, maturation, stabilisation and clarification.”
In terms of the Oxidation Reduction Potential (ORP), the study found that ‘brewery wastewater can be treated by biological processes on the basis that the reported ORP range permits biological activities’.
The study discovered: “The brewery wastewater treatment plant influent stream composition fluctuates significantly owing to the brewery in-house activities. These are washing of malted barley, which is rich in carbohydrates; brewing kettles; yeast fermentation tanks as well as other beer processing units, and which chemical was utilised. The high concentration in terms of orthophosphates and ammoniacal nitrogen could be a result of the type of acids used during brewing yeast and cleaning, such as phosphoric acid and nitric acid.”
The contents found in the wastewater give the brewery wastewater a high potential for it to be turned into bioenergy. These findings strike a double for the environment and for South Africa’s energy crisis which has been characterised by frequent electricity load-shedding at a national level.
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