Water

Recycling of process water in Jaffrey, NH, allows us to reuse 40% of the water drawn from natural resources.

Millipore’s membrane manufacturing and cartridge testing require millions of liters of water each year for product cleansing and testing. This ensures the quality and safety of those products before they touch therapeutic agents at our customers’ facilities. While maintaining these necessary standards, we also strive to reduce and reuse water when possible. This provides both environmental and financial benefits to Millipore and its local communities, since it’s expensive to use, treat and dispose of wastewater.

For example, our Kankakee, Illinois site manufactures Probumin®, bovine serum albumin (BSA), one of the most extensively utilized proteins in the medical industry. Its availability, inherent stability, and ligand binding ability, makes albumin an essential component in the production of many therapeutic drugs and diagnostic tests.

This process at our Kankakee site uses about 136 million liters a year – enough to fill about 140 Olympic size swimming pools. Much of this is due to using solvent recovery systems to cleanse acetone (a type of solvent) that evaporates during the manufacturing process. As part of our company-wide Process Excellence initiative, we explored how we might reduce water usage at the site.

Until recently, the solvent recovery systems were controlled by automated systems with settings only for high and low, so water was constantly running through the system, even when no air needed to be cleaned. By adding an “off” setting, we estimate we’ll reduce yearly water consumption by 23 million liters, about 17%. This will translate into significant savings as well, since the site currently purchases about $260,000 of water each year.

At our Cork, Ireland, facility, we use reject water from our reverse osmosis water purification systems to supply a cooling tower, which would otherwise use fresh potable water. This saves approximately 58,000 liters per year.

See our Jaffrey and Cork local efforts for more examples.

Although Millipore doesn’t currently report company-wide water usage and wastewater treatment/emission, we plan to do so beginning in 2008.

Process Flow Diagram (Simplified) of our water recycling system in Jaffrey, NH

Metrics

News

» More