Pharmaceutical Sludge - Case Study

Overview of pharmaceutical sludge:

Pharmaceutical wastewater is a type of organic wastewater with complex components, high biological toxicity, and difficult-to-degrade substances. It is a recognized source of serious environmental pollution.

Pharmaceutical wastewater is discharged intermittently, and the water quality and volume fluctuate greatly.

Pharmaceutical sludge refers to the precipitation material produced in the pharmaceutical wastewater treatment process. As a kind of hazardous waste with high hazard and toxicity, if it cannot be properly disposed of, random dumping and landfilling will have a difficult-to-repair impact on the surrounding environment.

Source of pharmaceutical wastewater:

A. Drainage from the production process: the most important waste water, including waste filtrate, waste mother liquor, other mother liquor, refining and purification process solvent recovery residue, etc.

B. Auxiliary process drainage: water, power equipment cooling water, circulating cooling water, system sewage, water ring vacuum equipment drainage, deionized water preparation process drainage, distillation (heating) equipment condensate, etc. This type of wastewater has a low concentration of pollutants, but the amount of water is large and seasonal, and there are large differences between enterprises. Some water ring vacuum equipment drainage contains solvents and high CODcr content.

C. Flushing water and others: including container equipment flushing water, filter equipment flushing water, resin column (tank) flushing water, ground flushing water, etc. Among them, the concentration of pollutants in the flushing water of the filtration equipment is also quite high, and the wastewater is mainly suspended solids; the amount of flushing water for the resin column is relatively large, the concentration of the initial flushing water is high, and the acid-base changes are large, and it is also a major type of wastewater.

Since the main components of wastewater produced in different stages of pharmaceutical factories are different, and the quality of wastewater produced by the production of different drugs is different, the components of the sludge produced are also different.