Kerry Ingredients’ Brisbane Site Enhances Sustainability with Hydroflux’s Sludge Dewatering Upgrade
Kerry Ingredients is a global leader in taste and nutrition solutions, specialising in the development of innovative flavourings and ingredients for the food and beverage industry.
Within the ANZ region, Kerry operates out of Murarrie, Brisbane where the site serves as an innovation, development, and application centre for the organisation, developing and supplying their products and food innovations for the local food and beverage businesses.
The original trade waste plant built by Hydroflux in 2017 was designed with the purpose to comply to the local trade waste limits imposed by QUU (Queensland Urban Utilities). This comprised of screening, balancing, pH correction, and solids separation using the Hydroflux HyDAF HD20 system. The produced sludge from the DAF system was sent into a conical bottom sludge tank which then needed to be disposed offsite by a vacuum truck periodically. After the successful completion of the trade waste project, Kerry retained the services of Hydroflux through Hydroflux Utilities, which supplies water treatment chemicals and provides specialised technical support for Kerry on the operations of the trade waste plant.
As Hydroflux continued to service the trade waste plant, a particular pain point that was noticed was the high costs Kerry was incurring to dispose of the sludge produced by the trade waste plant with the existing method. Upon investigation on methods to resolve this issue, Kerry re-engaged Hydroflux again in 2022 to add a sludge dewatering system to the existing trade waste plant with the objective to minimise the amount of sludge that needed to be disposed offsite.
In order to do so, Hydroflux then installed a new HUBER® Q280 screw press to dewater the sludge collected in the existing sludge tank, which dewatered the incoming sludge and produced a spadeable cake, successfully minimising the volume, and in consequence assisted Kerry to minimise the total disposal sludge costs incurred by the trade waste plant.
In addition to the screw press, Hydroflux also supplied an additional HydraBLEND polymer makeup and dosing system for the screw press to maximise the screw press’s dewatering performance, as well as introducing mixing to the existing sludge tank to ensure a homogenous sludge was sent for dewatering. The system was supplied and delivered to Kerry pre-installed on a small platform, which simplified and reduce the amount of installation works required on site.
