Minimisation strategy of petrochemical wastewater organic load

Industrial wastewater management is nowadays a reality in most industries and particularly in petrochemical ones. As a consequence, some treatment plants appear to be over designed because of waste minimization. Actually supplementary organic loads coming from incidents or external effluents have to be treated. As classical parameters or compound analyses are not well adapted, a new methodology based on the use of UV spectrophotometry is proposed. Starting from several samplesof wastewater in different points of sewage network, a procedure, called UVDIAG is used for the exploitation of the corresponding UV spectra. Some complementary measurements such as pH or conductivity can be carried out. This methodology allows a better characterization of wastewater including the detection of incidents and most often the determination of the major pollutant(s). Several months of application in a large petrochemical site located in the south of France have lead to a better knowledge of the waste production andthus to the reduction of organic load to be treated. At the same time, the company has decided to consider external wastes for treatment and to check the effluent conformity with the proposed procedure.