‘Water Industry is looking for bigger plants, municipals for smaller modular plants’
‘Water Industry clients are looking for bigger scale water treatment plants, while municipals are looking for smaller modular plants’, said CEO Menno Holterman at Nijhuis Industries in his keynote presentation at Blue Tech Forum.
Holterman discussed key industrial market trends, addressing issues such as new emerging business models, water re-use and the internet-of-things.
This year’s BlueTech Forum took place in Dublin, Ireland on 6 and 7 June.
Illustration used by Holterman to show the shift from small to large industrial water treatment plants, and the opposite trend in the municipal sector,
Seismic shift
As CEO of the Dutch water technology supply company Nijhuis Industries, Menno Holterman has the opportunity to experience water challenges across the globe. Nijhuis Industries, founded in 1904 and headquartered in the Netherlands, provides consultancy, design & build, maintenance and operational services for industrial and municipal wastewater projects on every continent.
‘We see clients now actively asking for integrated solutions, including finance, operations and maintenance, which is a seismic shift’, Holterman said. ‘We also see a lot of industries, making water reuse, for example, mandatory.’
He sees Nijhuis’ key global accounts taking responsibility and starting to implement these kind of measures.
Matter of time
‘It’s only a matter of time before some clients start reuse across production,” Holterman continued, ‘especially in areas of water scarcity. There are still a lot of brands that do not want the product water to be originated from treated effluent, so they want to discharge the water into a river and pick up the water hundreds of meters downstream, take it in, treat it and use it as product water.’
'But to take it directly from the effluent treatment plant back into the process or mix it with water originated from treated effluent is a no-go area, especially in the food, pharma and cosmetics industry, for mostly psychological and marketing reasons.'
Internet of things
In his key note Holterman also mentioned the internet of things. ‘This sensor technology is going to help us tremendously and we are already going to the next stage in developing software which will help us to predict the behavior of the plant if the characteristics of the water are changing”, he said.
Nijhuis has i-Monitoring devices in place with clients around the globe. ‘This data is also a very valuable resource to verify the design criteria of the extensive range of Nijhuis technologies and provide critical input to our R&D, design and process engineering teams ’, Holterman assured.
This news item was originally published on the websites of Nijhuis Industries and BlueTech Forum.
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● Nijhuis Industries completes low-cost wwtp for fertilizer producer Azomures, Romania, 23 September 2016
● IFAT 2016: A record of 14 water treatment innovations showcased by Nijhuis Industries, 6 June 2016
More information
Nijhuis Industries
Doetinchem, the Netherlands
+31 314 749 000
www.nijhuisindustries.com