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Craft Brewing Business

Lagunitas cuts water footprint by 40 percent with new technology

Water is basically everything for humans. We need it to live, and we need it to make beer. And some other stuff (we’re sure of it). Water is also a finite resource, especially out in California these days. This is what makes the work of Cambrian Innovation, provider of advanced biotechnology products for industrial businesses, so intriguing for the brewing industry.

CambrianLagunitas Brewing Co. Logo announced a major new product line, the EcoVolt Membrane Bioreactor (MBR). Extending and enhancing Cambrian’s distributed water offerings for growing industrial businesses, the EcoVolt MBR is a polishing process that removes over 99 percent of pollutants and solids, enabling water re-use on site. Lagunitas Brewing Co. stepped up as Cambrian’s first EcoVolt MBR customer.

“Cambrian turned our water management strategy on its head. We were throwing away money by trucking wastewater to a treatment facility. The EcoVolt Reactor helped us slash our utility costs by capturing the energy in our wastewater and treating water onsite,” said Leon Sharyon, CFO of Lagunitas Brewing Co. “Now with the EcoVolt MBR, we can expand the reuse applications for our water onsite.”

Optimizing brewery wastewater and spent grain management

cambrian EcoVolt system
Cambrian says its EcoVolt wastewater system can generate enough clean heat and electricity to eliminate more than 50 percent of the site’s baseload electricity use.

The EcoVolt MBR was designed specifically to serve the food and beverage industries. The containerized system leverages new aeration technology with proprietary automation, resulting “in the most energy efficient design on the market,” says Cambrian. Moreover, the EcoVolt MBR integrates with Cambrian’s EcoVolt Reactor, eliminating the extensive energy typically required for water reuse. The systems can be stacked for space-efficiency, remotely controlled and flexibly expanded.

For breweries, the EcoVolt MBR can be a highly efficient stand-alone water treatment solution that cleans water for onsite reuse or sewer discharge. When coupled with the bioelectrically enhanced EcoVolt Reactor, the net result is water reuse at a fraction of the energy demand of existing systems, says Cambrian. Lagunitas purchased the EcoVolt MBR to integrate with their existing EcoVolt Reactor installation, allowing them to cut their water footprint by 40 percent.

“Cambrian’s mission is to help our customers recover resources from their wastewater and that includes clean water. Building on the rapidly growing success of our EcoVolt Reactor, the EcoVolt MBR was designed from the ground up for energy efficient water re-use,” said Cambrian CEO Matthew Silver. “We couldn’t be more excited to make this state-of-the-art system available immediately to help our customers, cost-effectively solve their pressing water resource needs.”

For a ton of in-depth wastewater treatment technology, ideas and analysis, scroll through our archives.

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