What Is Minimal Liquid Discharge and Why Does It Matter?

Closeup shot of industrial wastewater

Water costs have increased by an average of 27% over the past decade. They’ve spiked even more dramatically in some regions—Austin, Texas, has faced a staggering increase of 154%. Minimal liquid discharge is an environmentally friendly way to slash water costs. Keep reading to learn more about minimal liquid discharge and how it benefits your business as well as the environment.

What Is Minimal Liquid Discharge?

Minimal liquid discharge (MLD) is a wastewater treatment technique that recovers 95% of water used in treatment. This process minimizes operating costs while maximizing water recovery. MLD is becoming an increasingly popular solution across the nation, especially in industrial and municipal plants.

Minimal liquid discharge can improve your circular water economy by recovering the majority of liquid discharge for reuse. While zero liquid discharge treatment options exist, they’re prohibitively expensive. MLD is the most practical and cost-effective path to making the most of your water.

We incorporate minimal liquid discharge into all of our PPE recycling processes, eliminating the need for conventional waste disposal. Instead of sending liquid over to wastewater treatment plants, MLD allows us to collect any liquid extracted in the process of laundering your PPE. If you don’t have a use for the collected liquids, we have use for them in our facility. This process has no waste runoff, which saves you money while benefiting the environment.

How Minimal Liquid Discharge Benefits You

Our minimal liquid discharge process offers a huge range of benefits, including:

Save Time

Minimal liquid discharge cuts out the time you normally waste dealing with the runoff from traditional treatment processes. This means that all of the steps involved in wastewater management are a thing of the past, including:

  • Contacting a wastewater treatment plant
  • Packaging wastewater
  • Shipping wastewater

Implement an Effective Wastewater Solution

Minimal liquid discharge makes wastewater challenges a thing of the past. You no longer need to worry about wastewater logistics or transportation since everything becomes reusable liquid. MLD eliminates the hassle of wastewater management.

Save Money

Minimal liquid discharge processes are cost effective because they help you avoid purchasing new liquids and use less water to complete the process. Water reuse is one of the best ways to save money—especially with water costs steadily rising.

Minimal Liquid Discharge Benefits the Environment by Reducing Waste

Minimal liquid discharge isn’t just good for your bottomline. It helps out the environment too. Minimal liquid discharge limits the waste of valuable resources, which is one of the primary ways we’re harming the environment. MLD can help you do your part to make sure that water and other chemical resources aren’t being wasted. Water isn’t limitless—we can run out eventually. While it’s unlikely this will happen in our lifetimes, this scarcity guarantees that water costs will continue to rise throughout our lifetimes.

Outside the use of water itself, an enormous amount of resources are expended when collecting and distributing it. Save money on every process involved with water with minimal liquid discharge.

ndustrial and factory waste water discharge pipe into the canal and sea, dirty water pollution

Why Creating an Environmentally Sustainable Society Is Important

We all have a collective responsibility to work towards a more sustainable society. Scientists agree that we’ve already begun to see the effects of climate change and that we’re working towards an irreversible tipping point. They believe if we don’t slow down climate change before we hit this tipping point, the results could be catastrophic. Some of these consequences include:

Higher Sea Levels

Sea levels have risen an average of eight inches since we started tracking them about a century ago. While this change doesn’t sound severe, they’re anticipated to rise faster every year because of the snowball effect climate change has. Current estimates show that sea levels will rise another 1 to 8 feet by 2100. This would be highly destructive. Coastal cities would be devastated by flooding, and with 40% of the world living within 100 kilometers of a coast, half its population would be directly impacted. These rising sea levels will further combine with sinking lands, higher tides, and storm surges to put coastal cities at a huge level of risk.

Studies have identified these American cities as the most at risk for coastal flooding:

  • Miami
  • Galveston
  • Ocean City
  • Fort Lauderdale
  • Charleston
  • Cambridge
  • Hampton
  • Norfolk

Even if you don’t live in any of these cities, a huge portion of our economy is tied up in them. These cities are massive hubs of manufacturing and transportation, so products that get delivered to your town probably go through them first.

Intense Storms

Hurricanes are becoming more intense every single year. NASA claims we’re overdue for another hurricane on the scale of Katrina, and more intense storm systems are in the cards for the future. This intensifying severe weather isn’t limited to storms; climate change causes extreme heat that has a domino effect on our entire environment.

Droughts

We’ve already started to deal with severe droughts in the American Southwest. Studies show that if greenhouse gas emissions keep up at their current rate, droughts that typically happen once every 20 years are going to start occuring on an annual basis.
Droughts impair crop development and can even lead to illness or death when severe enough. They’re expected to intensify and stretch across the United States in coming years, especially if we don’t take action. Scientists believe that the Central Plains region of the United States will be the next victim of droughts.

Solve Wastewater Challenges With Closed Loop

Closed Loop Recycling is committed to reducing your business’s costs and helping the environment. Start making a difference and contact us today.