Wastewater treatment plant for a worker camp

New Zealand is rich in precious metals such as gold, silver, and platinum. For this reason, worker camps are still being built on the islands today, where the coveted deposits are mined. Worker camps usually consist of several thousand people who build up their own infrastructure over time. One part of this is wastewater treatment. A wastewater treatment plant is particularly important for a worker camp to clean the produced wastewater.

A client asked for a wastewater treatment plant for a worker camp. Around 15 cubic metres of wastewater are produced there every day, which mainly comes from toilets, showers, and washrooms. Besides the hygienic wastewater with increased COD and BOD₅, process oils and dust residues are mixed into the wastewater.

The challenge of this project was the remoteness of the workers’ camp. There was no possibility to install a stationary wastewater treatment plant. Therefore, a decentralised solution was needed to reliably clean the wastewater produced. Moreover, since there was no possibility of discharge, it was necessary to treat the wastewater in such a way that it could be discharged directly into the environment. Reliability was particularly important in this case, as New Zealand is a biodiverse country and untreated wastewater must not be allowed to flow into the environment.

The ideal solution for this project was a ClearFox® containerised wastewater treatment plant for decentralised wastewater treatment. This initially consists of a buffer tank. This takes in the wastewater and passes it on to the fixed-bed reactor at regular intervals. There, solids such as sand and dust can first settle. Biological wastewater treatment takes place in the fixed-bed reactor. The fixed-bed material has a growth area of 200 m²/m³ and is thus ideally suited for the degradation of COD, BOD₅ and suspended solids. Subsequently, a lamella clarifier separates the clear water from the secondary sludge.

The ClearFox® containerised wastewater treatment plant with FBBR technology is the ideal solution for this project, as it only requires a power connection to reliably treat the produced wastewater. Due to the use of the special fixed-bed material, the biology grows quickly, so that excellent purification results are achieved after only a few days. Due to the stable construction, the wastewater treatment plant for a worker camp only needs a stable base. The 20-foot ISO sea container used is particularly suitable for worldwide transport – by land by truck, by sea by container ship. Due to these numerous advantages, the ClearFox® containerised wastewater treatment plant was the best solution for the customer.