Epuramat's Box4Water Turns Wastewater to Drinking Water in Portable System

CONTERN, LU -- Luxembourg cleantech firm Epuramat has developed a portable wastewater treatment system called Box4Water that the company says can be deployed in sites ranging from communities, fairs and sports venues to remote areas and scenes of disaster.

The heart of the system is a high efficiency extreme separator, called an ExSep. It enables the 20-foot-long Box4Water and larger units the company builds as turnkey plants to process residential and industrial wastewater using less water and less energy in about 90 percent of the space occupied by a standard treatment plant.

The company, whose systems are being used in community and industrial pilot projects in Luxembourg, delivered a presentation about its technology at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi in January. It was one of only seven enterprises invited to do so.

Here are diagrams of the Epuramat system showing the processing steps in flowchart form ...



and in a simplified look at how it works ...



For an interactive version of the How It Works diagram, click here.

The process starts in a pretreatment unit called the rake that separates liquids from large solids, which are diverted for sludge treatment. The next step brings the material to the ExSep, the core of the Epuramat technology and the workhorse of the process, which replaces the grit chambers and primary sedimentation basins in conventional plants. Then the wastewater and mostly dissolved solids are cleaned further and sent to membrane filtration for subsequent treatment, while material the ExSep had captured during its cleaning is routed for sludge treatment.

The company materials show the cost of the most basic Box4Water unit at 150,000 euros, currently just under $200,000. That unit is capable of processing waste from an enclave of about 200 people or some 2.5 cubic meters, about 660 gallons, of wastewater an hour.

The company's larger systems can serve communities of 500 to 50,000 people and industrial waste at a volume as much as 600 cubic meters, or almost 159,000 gallons, an hour.