Veolia Water Technologies South Africa, part of Veolia, the global leader in optimized resource management, has been awarded its third major project at Retail Brands Interafrica’s (RBI) Wadeville factory, near Johannesburg, to bring overall treated throughput at the site’s South Plant to 120 m3 per hour.

Originally designed and built by Veolia in 2006 to provide process and manufacturing water for the bottling of Pepsi, the plant underwent its first major upgrade in 2010 to increase the hourly throughput of 60 m3 by 50% – enough to cater for the company’s new Ceres Fruit Juice production plant. The latest upgrade, awarded mid-2013, will improve output to 120 m3 per hour, and will be commissioned before the plant’s peak production run for the December festive season.

Veolia’s Project Engineer, Hirsheda Jeram, provided details: “This latest upgrade was envisaged when we planned the first upgrade in 2010, so we factored most of the requirements into our original designs. However, since 2010, RBI has experienced significant growth, and the planned capacity needed to double in order for them to meet their demands. We accommodated for this increased demand by designing a much larger filtration unit than initially specified.”

Veolia is working closely with RBI to integrate and commission the latest upgrade without affecting day-to-day manufacturing.

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Veolia has completed installations for PepsiCo internationally, providing experience to ensure that plants are designed and built to maximise both efficiency and ease of operation. Experience in the local market has also ensured that plants are able to cater for specific requirements in terms of the local environment.

“For the soft drink industry especially, the alkalinity of the water determines, to some degree, the taste of the product. Therefore, clean water needs to be of consistent quality in order for the product to remain the same batch after batch,” says Jeram.

Once the quality of the inlet and outlet water is determined, engineers are able to tailor-make the process to produce the required quality. The most important aspects in the food and beverage industry relating to the use of water are the removal of chlorine, taste and odour compounds and the control of alkalinity and micro-organisms. Various processes of filtration are used to accomplish this and are often used in combination.

Using state-of-the-art technologies, along with food-grade stainless steel components for final product quality and consistency, the plant’s main treatment train features dechlorination, polishing, filtration and UV disinfection. “The plant is designed to upgrade municipal drinking water to comply with RBI’s strict water specifications,” concluded Jeram.