Covestro leads project to recycle salt from wastewater

Covestro is spearheading a research project for the environmentally friendly recovery of salt from industrial wastewater.

The Leverkusen-based materials manufacturer is working alongside industry and academic partners on the three-year project, known as ‘Re-Salt’, to find a way to use treated salt and purified wastewater in electrolysis processes to produce chlorine.

“A key objective of this project is to increase the salt content of the salt solutions as much as possible in an environmentally friendly manner during the treatment process,” said Project Coordinator, Dr. Yuliya Schiesser, a Process Researcher at Covestro. This will be done, in part, by using the waste heat from the company’s production plants.

“Our ultimate goal is to develop a process that benefits not just the plastics industry but other industry segments as well,” Schiesser added.

Covestro is planning a demonstration plant for testing purposes at its Krefeld-Uerdingen site in Germany, the location where it brought a pilot plant on stream in early 2016.

This pilot plant uses a recycling process developed in-house to purify salt-laden process wastewater so that it can be reused for the production of chlorine, a key raw material for the manufacture of polycarbonate and other plastics.

The technology utilised at Krefeld-Uerdingen is the basis for the “Re-Salt” project.

The other project participants are the German Water Center, Donau Carbon GmbH, the University of Duisburg-Essen University, Dechema-Forschungsinstitut, Envirochemie GmbH and TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences.