Judy Ledlee
Senior Technical Service Engineer, ZwitterCo
Judy Ledlee is a Senior Technical Service Engineer at ZwitterCo. She works with clients to develop applications and ensure project success. Prior to working at ZwitterCo, Judy worked at Black & Veatch as a process engineer designing water treatment systems and at Evoqua designing Memcor ultrafiltration systems. She obtained her doctoral degree from Duke University for her research on membrane distillation.
Zwitterionic Membrane Process Enables High-strength Dairy Wastewater Reuse
As wastewater regulations become stricter and corporations implement sustainability initiatives, dairy processors are searching for solutions to achieve their environmental goals and reduce wastewater costs. High-strength dairy wastewater discharge often results in expensive municipal surcharges due to elevated concentrations of fats, oils, greases, and organic material. Traditional wastewater management options such as dissolved air flotation systems (DAFs) and hauling each present their own limitations and do not produce clean water for onsite reuse. The development of zwitterionic superfiltration (SF) membranes that are immune to irreversible organic fouling is creating new opportunities in dairy wastewater reuse by providing superior protection to downstream reverse osmosis (RO) systems. This presentation reviews a dairy processor case study of a novel, on-site SF-RO wastewater treatment process. The SF-RO process was selected over other alternatives due to its smaller footprint and high quality effluent. This work provides insight to the SF-RO technology operational characteristics, with particular focus on how the SF membrane improves downstream RO operations. As a result of implementing this solution, this facility has significantly reduced its hauling costs. This SF-RO process can be used throughout the dairy industry to enable compliance with discharge permits while reducing wastewater costs and enabling water reuse.