Industrial wastewater challenges in the pharmaceutical, chemical, and cosmetics sectors require reliable and flexible treatment solutions. Advanced technologies such as MBR and AnMBR biological processes, UF combined with lime softening for RO brine and cooling tower blowdown recovery, and robust tubular UF systems enable tailored wastewater management while ensuring regulatory compliance, resource efficiency, and environmental responsibility.
Pharma, chemical and cosmetics industry wastewater varies widely in flow and composition, influenced by production volume, batch schedules, and the type of final product manufactured. As a result, both the characteristics and peak pollutant load of the wastewater can fluctuate significantly over time.
Wastewater treatment in these industries has traditionally relied on biological processes, which remain a cornerstone of conventional treatment systems. However, growing regulatory pressure and the increasing complexity of industrial effluents have highlighted the limitations of traditional technologies. In many cases, biological treatment alone is no longer sufficient to achieve the high contaminant removal efficiencies and stringent discharge standards now required, prompting a shift toward more advanced and integrated treatment solutions.
High concentrations of organic compounds, including readily biodegradable substances such as alcohols and ketones.
Slowly biodegradable or refractory organics, including various organic solvents, aromatic compounds, and chlorinated hydrocarbons.
Active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), known to have a detrimental impact on the environment, due to the fact that they are bio-refractory and persistent, tending to accumulate in the environment.
Inhibitory and toxic substances, such as phenols and antibiotics, which can hinder biological treatment processes.
Soaps, detergents, and surfactants, originating from formulation processes and cleaning operations.
External MBR systems provide a highly robust solution for treating challenging pharmaceutical and chemical wastewaters. Operation at high MLSS and long SRT promotes specialized biomass capable of degrading complex and slowly biodegradable compounds, ensuring stable and resilient performance even under fluctuating or harsh influent loads.
For highstrength streams, AnMBR is gaining attention as an efficient alternative, combining anaerobic digestion with membrane separation to convert organic matter into biogas. This makes AnMBR particularly suitable for streams such as bioethanol wastewater, offering the added benefit of reducing sludge production.
Finally, UF combined with chemical precipitation is also key to enabling ZLD strategies. These industries rely on high purity water, typically produced through RO systems which generate large brine volumes. Cooling towers, widely used across these facilities, produce the CTBD. In both cases, lime softening is an essential pre-treatment step to remove hardness and silica, protecting downstream membranes and reducing scaling tendencies.
The chemical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics industries generate highly complex wastewater streams, often containing toxic compounds, along with refractory or slowly biodegradable substances, including active pharmaceutical ingredients.
MBRs offer a distinct advantage in treating such effluents. Operating at high MLSS and long SRT, MBRs cultivate a specialized and robust biomass that is significantly more capable of degrading persistent pollutants and withstanding toxic shocks. Under these conditions, the microbial community develops enhanced enzymatic pathways and resilience, enabling the system to maintain stability even when exposed to fluctuating or inhibitory influent loads.
As a result, MBRs consistently deliver superior effluent quality, achieving levels of solids and organic removal that outperform all other biological treatment technologies. This makes MBRs a leading solution for industries where stringent discharge limits and difficult‑to‑treat contaminants are the norm.
Bioprocess Performance
MBRs effectively treat poorly biodegradable compounds typical of pharmaceutical, chemical, and cosmetics wastewaters. Operation at high SRT promotes specialized biomass, enabling higher degradation efficiencies of certain components, often over 50 % greater than conventional treatment systems.
Effluent Quality
The system delivers very high effluent quality, producing solids and turbidity-free water with SDI consistently below 3. This allows direct feeding to RO and makes the effluent ideal for highpurity reuse applications in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
Compactness
Berghof UF systems feature a highly compact, footprintflexible design that simplifies plant retrofits. Plug-and-play configuration minimizes civil works, installation effort, downtime, and accelerates performance upgrades.
Robust & Flexible
External tubular UF provides superior flexibility and robustness for variable pharmaceutical and chemical wastewaters. Built-in fouling control ensures stable performance under shock loads, toxic influent, and inhibitory conditions — where submerged systems often struggle.
Wastewater streams generated during the production of pharmaceutical, chemical, or cosmetic products are first combined in an equalization tank. Because these processes often involve the use of acidic and alkaline substances, the mixed wastewater typically requires pH neutralization to bring it within the optimal range for downstream treatment.
The removal of organic contaminants is achieved in the tubular MBR, which integrates a biological reactor with high‑performance tubular UF modules. This configuration ensures reliable separation of solids and biomass, producing a consistently high‑quality effluent that meets even the strictest discharge standards for surface waters.
For facilities seeking to reduce their water footprint, the treated effluent offers valuable opportunities for water reuse. Depending on the quality requirements of each specific application, the MBR effluent can be reused directly for non‑critical processes or polished with RO to obtain high‑purity water suitable for more demanding operations.
As the chemical industry intensifies its efforts to reduce its water footprint, it increasingly produces higher‑strength and more concentrated wastewater. AnMBR stands out as an optimal solution for these applications. With a positive net energy balance, AnMBR converts organic pollutants into biogas, reducing overall energy consumption. At the same time, the membrane separation step ensures superior effluent quality, eliminating the need for complex or costly post treatment processes.
AnMBR offers an efficient pathway for energy recovery from challenging chemical wastewater streams. In this configuration, tubular UF membranes are integrated with a simple CSTR‑type anaerobic reactor, enabling operation at high organic loading rates while consistently producing a high‑quality, solids‑free effluent.
The external Berghof tubular membranes ensure complete biomass retention within the anaerobic reactor, which significantly enhances biological performance. Compared to granular‑sludge anaerobic technologies such as UASB or EGSB, AnMBR provides clear advantages in the chemical sector:
The high‑strength wastewater streams generated throughout chemical production are first routed to an equalization tank, where flow homogenization and pH correction may be required. At this stage, nutrients and micronutrients are often dosed to ensure optimal and stable anaerobic biological activity in the downstream process.
The AnMBR then treats the wastewater in a single, highly efficient step, simultaneously removing organic pollutants and converting them into renewable energy in the form of biogas. Thanks to complete biomass retention, the system produces a high‑quality permeate that is suitable for sewer discharge and, in many cases, also meets the criteria for direct discharge into natural receiving waters.
When water reuse is targeted, the AnMBR permeate can be further polished with RO to generate high‑purity recycled water, significantly reducing freshwater consumption and overall water footprint.
Pharmaceutical and chemical production processes generate significant volumes of RO reject and CTBD. As these industries intensify their efforts to reduce water consumption and pursue minimum or zero liquid discharge strategies, the recovery of these challenging streams, often enriched with high hardness, silica, and other scaling constituents, is becoming increasingly important.
Here, Berghof’s Chemical Resistant (CR) membranes are implemented because the lime softening process occurs at alkaline pH, ensuring durability and reliable performance under challenging conditions.
Effluent Quality
Permeate quality exceeds clarifier-treated water, fully removing suspended solids, achieving turbidity under 1 NTU, and an SDI below 3. It can be fed directly into the RO system, eliminating the need for intermediate filtration steps.
Full Reliability
Variations in feed water quality can affect clarifier and multimedia filters effluent. UF membranes fully block precipitates, ensuring solid-free permeate even during process changes.
Less chemicals
No coagulants or flocculants are needed. This can reduce chemical consumption by 25 – 30% compared to conventional gravity-settling methods.
Compactness
Only a single separation step is required upstream of the RO system, resulting in a significantly reduced overall footprint. Compared with conventional treatment trains — including clarifiers, multimedia filters, and hollowfiber UF — this configuration achieves space savings of more than threefold.
The RO brine generated during high‑purity water production and/or the CTBD is recovered in a process combining the chemical precipitation and the tubular UF. In the first step, chemicals such as CaO, NaOH, or Na₂CO₃ are dosed to raise the pH and promote the precipitation of hardness, silica, and other salts.
The precipitated mixture is then processed through CR modules equipped with chemically resistant membranes. Connected to a concentration tank, these modules produce a permeate with significantly reduced dissolved solids and a concentrated reject rich in precipitated solids. The reject stream is subsequently dewatered in a filter press, minimizing disposal volume. After pH neutralization, the UF permeate is fed to a second RO stage, producing high‑quality water suitable for reuse.
This case study demonstrates how tubular ultrafiltration enables efficient RO concentrate treatment in the chemical industry, supporting water reuse and ZLD.
