In 2020, AS Estonian Cell was declared the winner of the competition ”Environmentally Friendly Company of the Year in Estonia“. With H+E components Estonian Cell came a significant step closer to its goal of becoming the best producer of pulp in the world.
Estland 2020
Award Winner: AS Estonian Cell
Due to the new wastewater treatment and the resulting savings of 5.5 GWh/a of electricity, Estonian Cell was declared the winner of the competition ”Environmentally Friendly Company of the Year in Estonia“.
Developed Solution
Because of expanding its production capacity to 200,000 tons of pulp per year AS Estonian Cell invested in the gradual expansion of its wastewater treatment plant in 2018. The original pond bio-reactor was equipped with a membrane aeration system, which was no longer able to fulfil the high requirements of the special wastewater of the pulp production. The H+E specialists for paper and pulp wastewater developed a tailor-made process with ideally suited components to permanently optimise the unsatisfactory situation and additionally achieve energy savings.
Applied process combination
In a first step, the large quantities of anaerobic sludge that repeatedly pass over from the upstream anaerobic stage are removed in the FLOCOMAT.T contact sludge reactor, which has been tried and tested for decades, with almost no energy expenditure. The downstream activated sludge plant has been completely redesigned as a selector cascade revitalisation system and equipped with the extremely robust and at the same time highly efficient AEROFIT.V aerators. In a comparison test lasting several months, the AEROFIT.V aerators proved to be far ahead of the competition in terms of both aeration efficiency and resistance to oxalate encrustation. The AEROFIT.V aerators designed by H+E have been used worldwide with great success for over 20 years. Due to the wellplanned design, the aeration outlet gap is largely self-cleaning, thus allowing for many years of trouble-free operation.
Facts & Figures
- Flow rate: 8,640 m³/d
- COD inlet: 52 t/d
- Energy saving: 5.5 GWh of electricity per year