Dairy wastewater treatment. The technology of food preparation creates waste varying in quantity, pollution, state of aggregation, etc.

Wastewater of the food industry is considered concentrated by the level of contaminants. It contains a significant amount of organic substances.

The most contaminated is the wastewater from alcohol, meat, dairy and sugar industries. Since these enterprises are situated mainly in urban areas, some of their wastewater is dumped into central sewage system. However, urban wastewater treatment plants work inefficiently. Moreover, the wastewater of most food companies does not comply with the requirements of their discharge into the sewer on the concentration of contaminants, causing violations of the rules and regulations.

Over the years, the food industry has been trying to solve the problem of wastewater treatment in the outdated sewage treatment plants based on traditional biological treatment technology, which was used to clean domestic wastewater. But this technique is not suitable for purification of concentrated effluents.

To solve the problem of treating concentrated wastewater, the anaerobic-aerobic treatment technology was proposed .

First, this technology sharply reduces the concentration of contaminants by methane fermentation, then finally treats the wastewater in aeration tanks with aerobic fermentation.

The implementation of methane fermentation coincided with the search for new, alternative energy sources, since methane fermentation produces biogas, which could prove to be a cheap source of energy. Biogas could be produced from both liquid and solid waste of virtually all food production facilities.