Getting water from milk cms. groupeditors. com
From left: Chris Ngwendu( Nestlé Mossel Bay manager), Gugile Nkwinti( minister of water affairs and sanitation), and Helene Budlinger Artieda( Swiss ambassador).
A Mossel Bay milk factory has revolutionised its production processes by switching to an approach that will see them reduce reliance on municipal water.
The Nestlé factory, which produces various milk products, including Nespray and Nido, will now rely on milk water by evaporating the water in the cow’ s milk processed on site. This will then be captured and reused in the factory.
The zero-water manufacturing site, inaugurated by Water and Sanitation Minister Gugile Nkwinti, is the latest branch of
the Swiss multinational to implement this system— under the title of Project ZerEau.
Factories in Mexico, India, and China are already on similar systems. The company has invested R84-million to install and implement the new system. Nestlé South Africa corporate affairs director Ravi Pillay says that a further five factories were in the process of transitioning to the system, with 14 more factories employing certain elements in their processes. According to Pillay, the milk being processed at the plant could contain up to 88 % water, though the system is currently recovering around 65 %.
“ The plant processes fresh cow’ s milk through an evaporation process,” Pillay explains.“ The evaporated water is captured and treated through reverse osmosis, then remineralised and used for various applications within the facility. Water is also recycled by using anaerobic digester technology coupled with ultra-filtration and reverse osmosis systems.”
Through this, the factory saves about 467 tankers’ worth of water monthly, compared to its usage before it began implementing water-reduction plans in 2009.“ Municipal water is still required for various day-to-day uses, such as employee consumption and fire systems. The municipal usage is dependent on the volumes of milk processed and water recovered.”
Water from air
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have discovered a unique way to extract clean, pure water out of air. This discovery could save millions of people living in waterstarved regions across the world.
Scientists managed to successfully extract clean, drinkable water at very low humidity and at a low cost using their newly built nextgeneration water harvester. Omar Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter chair in chemistry at UC Berkeley and inventor of the technology, says“ There is nothing like this. It operates at ambient temperature with ambient sunlight, and with no additional energy input you can collect water in the desert. This laboratory-to-desert journey allowed us to really turn water harvesting from an interesting phenomenon into a science.”
Where it all started
In October 2017, scientists created a prototype water harvester, which sucked water out of the air using just sunlight as energy. Their initial discovery led them to create an even larger water extractor machine, bringing them closer to their goal of providing lifelong clean and drinkable water to people living in water-scarce areas.
Yaghi, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and his team are set to report the results of the water-collecting harvester’ s first field test in an edition of the scientific journal, Science Advances.
The trial was conducted in Scottsdale, where the relative humidity drops as low as eight per cent a day. Despite low humidity levels, the harvester demonstrated its ability to extract water from even the scarcest places, after scientists added more of the machine’ s water absorber— a highly porous material comprising a metal-organic framework, or MOF.
Omar Yaghi, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Today at Berkeley Lab
1.5 l billion
The number of litres lost in
South Africa every year through leaks.