Volga brewery’s new wastewater treatment in Russia is another step towards delivering HEINEKEN Russia water stewardship commitments
The Company's commitment to use water resources responsibly includes treating all wastewater to a high standard before it is discharged back into the environment. One recent success is the new wastewater treatment plant which came into operation at Volga brewery in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, in 2016.
HEINEKEN Russia first took over the Volga brewery in 2004 and quickly began investing in its improvement. Since that time, the brewery has taken on considerable economic importance for the region. But, with an average of 3,900 m3 of wastewater per day, the brewery wastewater accounted for a major part of the organic loading of Nizhny Novgorod’s municipal wastewater treatment plant. This, along with increasingly stringent legislation on industrial trade waste discharges, made it inevitable that Volga would need to modernize its sewage infrastructure. As a result, HEINEKEN Russia committed to modernize the sewage infrastructure at the brewery.
The construction of wastewater treatment facilities began in 2013 and the plant was commissioned and up and running in 2016. It uses a treatment approach that is relatively new to Russian industry. A part of a two-stage process, effluent from the brewery is first treated under anaerobic conditions using bacteria that do not require oxygen to break down the organic matter in the wastewater into biogas. Biogas can be collected and used as a renewable energy source. The remaining effluent is then treated using aerobic bacteria before the treated wastewater is returned to the city sewerage system. By combining anaerobic and aerobic technologies we can treat the wastewater to a very high standard while consuming less energy than through a standard aerobic wastewater treatment process.
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