DuPont ‘ready for Mideast challenge’
01 September 2011
ONE of the most pressing problems faced by the Middle East is an acute shortage of water, and experts predict that the current supply of water will further dwindle by half over the next four decades, according to DuPont Clean Water Technologies, one of the world’s largest commercial industrial wastewater treatment facility operators.
The company points out that governments in the Middle East are spending more than $130 billion on water and waste-water management annually, in a region where about 45 million people lack access to fresh water.
In a bid to address the region’s water issues, DuPont Clean Water Technologies has been introducing innovative water and waste-water technologies while optimising its own water usage.
DuPont creates tailored, proven solutions that can help reduce particulate, sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) or sulphur emissions or formulate cleaner fuels. The company is committed to providing innovative processes and products for environmental health and safety that also help keep customer operations running efficiently.
It offers a wide range of products to preserve the Middle East’s water resources. Its ISO14000-certified wastewater management solutions can be deployed for pre-treatment and treatment, organic recovery for high-water-content waste streams, and waste treatment for customers with as few as 30 gallons of treatable water.
Chlorine dioxide (ClO2) solutions offered by DuPont are capable of killing bacteria, spores, viruses, fungi and algae within shorter contact time. CIO2 systems are also being evaluated by Dubai, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, thus making the Gulf one of the key markets for DuPont ClO2 disinfection solutions. “When compared to conventional chlorine disinfection methods, ClO2 minimises disinfection by-products such as trihalomethanes, haloacetic acids and bromate, which are bio-persistent and chemicals with health risk,” says Cengizhan Okur, sales leader Clean Water TMENA (Turkey, Middle East and North Africa), DuPont Chemical and Fluoro. “This results in achieving environmentally safe and satisfactory disinfection results with much less chemical.”
“DuPont plans to play an integral role to meet Middle East’s water management challenges through our science and innovation,” says Okur.
DuPont also uses ‘steam stripping’, an economical and eco-friendly method of treating wastewater streams during petroleum and petrochemical clean-up operations. The approach strips targeted organic compounds out of the water so that only they are burned rather than the entire waste stream.
Internal water conservation programmes form an integral part of DuPont’s overall water management agenda. The company aims to reduce water consumption by at least 30 per cent over the next 10 years at its global sites located in areas such as the Middle East where renewable freshwater supply is limited or stressed.
For its other sites, DuPont intends to retain existing consumption levels through the year 2015 through conservation, reuse and recycling initiatives that balance against production volume growths.
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