Industrial effluent
Textile, food and beverage, electroplating, rubber, palm oil mill. 50 to 5,000 m³/day. Standard A or B, guaranteed in the contract with a defined remedy if we miss it.
Shah Alam, Selangor · Design–build–operate · 74 plants commissioned
In goes 210 NTU.
Out comes 0.09.
Industrial effluent, water reuse and zero-liquid discharge for Malaysian manufacturers. We put the discharge limit in the contract as a guarantee, not an aspiration — and we publish what a cubic metre costs to run.
- Plants commissioned
- 74
- Largest
- 4,800 m³/day
- Standard A first pass
- 71 of 74
- Callout, 24 h
- Contractual
Nearly every effluent problem we are called to is the same problem: a plant that was sized for the factory as it was in 2016, running a factory as it is now, with a chemical dosing regime nobody has adjusted since commissioning. It fails on a Tuesday, the department writes a letter, and everyone starts talking about a new plant.
Often it does not need one. What it needs is somebody to sit with the flow meter for a fortnight and find out what is actually arriving. We will do that first, and we will tell you if the answer is a RM 40,000 upgrade rather than a RM 2 million plant — which is a bad quarter for us and the reason people call us back.
01 / The treatment train
Six unit processes,
one falling number
A textile dyehouse in Rawang, 1,200 m³ a day. Scroll and the flow works its way along; every reading below is the actual design figure at the outlet of that unit, not a marketing number.
Turbidity210 NTU
TSS320 mg/L
BOD₅480 mg/L
Colour1,850 ADMI
-
Unit 01
Screening & equalisation
A 6 mm mechanical bar screen, then 8 hours of buffer volume. The screen removes lint and rag; the buffer removes the thing that actually kills plants, which is a dyehouse dumping a batch drop at 14:00 and nothing at all until 22:00. Everything downstream is designed for an average that only exists because this tank makes it exist.
- Retention
- 8 h
- Screen
- 6 mm, auto-raked
- Power
- 0.04 kWh/m³
-
Unit 02
Coagulation & flocculation
pH corrected to 6.8, then PAC at 180 mg/L in a rapid mixer at G = 600 s⁻¹, then anionic polymer at 2 mg/L in three slow-mix chambers at descending G. The dye molecules do not settle on their own; they have to be given something to hold on to and then twenty minutes of gentle stirring to find each other.
- Coagulant
- PAC, 180 mg/L
- Polymer
- Anionic, 2 mg/L
- Jar-tested
- Monthly
-
Unit 03
Dissolved air flotation
Dye floc is lighter than water and refuses to sink, so we do not ask it to. Recycle water saturated at 4.5 bar is released into the cell, comes out of solution as microbubbles, attaches to the floc and carries it to the surface, where a skimmer takes it off. This one unit does most of the visible work — it is where the water stops being purple.
- Loading
- 6.2 m³/m²·h
- Recycle
- 12%, 4.5 bar
- Sludge
- 4.1% solids to press
-
Unit 04
MBBR biological
Two aerated tanks packed 45% with moving carrier media, giving 500 m² of biofilm per cubic metre. Bacteria eat what chemistry could not: the dissolved organics. This is the stage that punishes neglect — starve it of air for six hours, or shock it with a solvent dump, and it takes a fortnight to come back.
- Media fill
- 45%, 500 m²/m³
- HRT
- 9.5 h
- DO held
- 2.5–3.5 mg/L
-
Unit 05
Ultrafiltration
0.03 µm hollow fibre, outside-in, backwashed every 30 minutes and chemically cleaned every 21 days. Nothing biological gets past it and neither does any remaining floc. The permeate is what makes reuse possible; without a membrane here, the RO downstream would foul in a month.
- Pore
- 0.03 µm
- Flux
- 45 LMH
- Recovery
- 93%
-
Unit 06
UV disinfection & reuse
40 mJ/cm² of UV at 254 nm, validated, with lamp-intensity monitoring that alarms before it drifts out of dose. From here 68% of the flow goes back to the dyehouse as process water and the balance discharges — comfortably inside Standard A, which is the point of the whole exercise.
- Dose
- 40 mJ/cm²
- Reuse
- 68% of flow
- Discharge
- Standard A
02 / What we build
Five kinds of plant,
and the ones we decline
Water reuse & ZLD
UF–RO trains recovering 60–85% of effluent as process water. Full zero-liquid discharge with evaporators where the water tariff or the discharge consent makes the arithmetic work — and we will show you when it does not.
Sewage treatment
Package and civil STPs to Standard A, 100 to 3,000 population equivalent, for industrial estates and campuses. Designed for the sludge to be someone's routine, not someone's emergency.
Process & boiler water
Softening, demineralisation, RO and EDI for boilers and rinse water. Small plants, high consequences — a boiler fed on the wrong water is an expensive lesson.
Sludge dewatering
Belt and screw presses, polymer make-up, conditioning. Usually the last thing anyone thinks about and the first thing that fills the yard.
What we decline
Anything we cannot characterise. If nobody will let us sample the raw effluent for two weeks, we will not quote — a plant designed off a single grab sample is a plant designed off the best hour of the month.
03 / Compliance
The numbers we sign for
From the Rawang dyehouse contract. The middle column is what we guarantee; the right is the regulated limit. We design the gap in deliberately, because a plant that only just passes on day one fails in year three.
| Parameter | Raw | We guarantee | Standard A limit | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BOD₅ (mg/L) | 480 | ≤ 12 | 20 | 40% |
| COD (mg/L) | 1,340 | ≤ 65 | 80 | 19% |
| Suspended solids (mg/L) | 320 | ≤ 20 | 50 | 60% |
| Colour (ADMI) | 1,850 | ≤ 60 | 100 | 40% |
| Ammoniacal nitrogen (mg/L) | 28 | ≤ 6 | 10 | 40% |
| pH | 4.2 – 11.6 | 6.5 – 8.5 | 6.0 – 9.0 | — |
| Turbidity (NTU) | 210 | ≤ 1.0 | not regulated | — |
| If we miss it | — | We fix it | Our cost, including chemicals and any consultant the department requires, until three consecutive monthly samples pass | |
04 / Cost
What a cubic metre
actually costs to treat
Same plant, 1,200 m³/day, averaged over the last twelve months of operation. Nobody publishes this. It is the single most useful number in the whole project and it is the one every proposal leaves out.
| Line | RM / m³ | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Electricity | 0.62 | 1.48 kWh/m³ at RM 0.42/kWh — aeration is two thirds of it |
| Coagulant & polymer | 0.41 | PAC 180 mg/L, polymer 2 mg/L, at delivered drum prices |
| pH correction | 0.11 | Caustic and acid, varies with the dye recipe that week |
| Membrane cleaning | 0.09 | CIP chemicals every 21 days plus sanitiser |
| Sludge disposal | 0.38 | 1.9 t/day at 22% solids to a licensed contractor |
| Membrane replacement | 0.17 | UF at 7 years, RO at 4, sunk into a monthly reserve |
| Operator | 0.34 | One certified operator per shift, two shifts |
| Lab & reporting | 0.07 | Monthly accredited sampling and the DOE submission |
| Total | RM 2.19 | Against a mains tariff of RM 3.24/m³ for this consumer band — which is why the reuse pays |
05 / Operations
A plant is not a purchase.
It is a habit.
Roughly two thirds of the failing plants we are called to were built correctly. They failed because somebody stopped dosing polymer in 2021 to save RM 900 a month, and nobody checked.
01
Daily, by your operator
pH, DO, flow, sludge blanket, and a two-minute visual on the DAF skimmer. Ten minutes. Written down, not remembered.
02
Monthly, by us
Jar test against the current effluent, dosing re-set, blower and pump check, membrane trend review, accredited sample and the department submission.
03
Quarterly
Full instrument calibration, sludge inventory, energy audit against the design figure. This is where creeping cost shows up first.
04
When it goes wrong
A phone that a person answers, 24 hours a day, and someone on site within four hours in the Klang Valley. That clause is in every O&M contract we sign.
06 / Asked often
Straight answers
We already have a plant. Can you make it comply?
Usually, and usually for less than you fear. We start with two weeks of composite sampling and a hydraulic check. About half the jobs that come to us as "we need a new plant" end as a dosing overhaul, a blower replacement and an operator retrained.
How long from order to commissioning?
For a 1,000 m³/day physical-chemical plant on a prepared site: 22 to 26 weeks, of which about nine are civil works and six are equipment lead time. Anything involving imported membranes, add four. We will show you the bar chart with the float in it, not the one without.
Do you operate plants, or only build them?
Both, and we would rather do both. About 40 of the 74 plants we have built are on an O&M contract with us. It is also how we learn what our own designs do after year three, which no amount of drawing office time will teach you.
What if our production changes?
Tell us. A new dye class, a new degreaser, a second shift — any of these can move the design point. Half a day of our time before the change costs a great deal less than a month of non-compliance after it.
Can you help with the DOE submission?
Yes, and it is included in every O&M contract. We prepare it, you sign it, and we keep the sampling chain of custody so that it holds up if it is ever questioned.
07 / Start here
Send us twelve months
of your effluent reports
Not a brief, not a tender document — the actual monthly test results, the water bill and a note on what your factory makes. We will come back within a week with what we think is happening and what it would take to fix, at no charge and with no obligation.
Office & works
No. 9, Jalan Utarid U5/16
Seksyen U5, 40150 Shah Alam
Selangor
Breakdowns
+60 19 344 5900
24 hours, answered by an engineer