In Sohar, Oman, we donate these membranes to other companies. More specifically, Sohar Operation Services (SOS) has donated close to 196 used membranes to the neighboring Majis-RO plant, operated by OSWS, for them to use in their system as part of a trial program.
Including the latter, we have donated 900 membranes in total. In the future, SOS will transfer most of our used membranes to Majis’ facilities. SOS’ team is hard at work with other simultaneous installations to check whether it’s viable to donate the remaining membranes.
Moreover, we have processes in place to recover filtration media. That is the case of our desalination plant in Skikda, Algeria. We have found a solution to deal with this material that would otherwise be waste.
This process is mechanical, and it is viable to carry out with local companies, which significantly reduces the negative impact of this periodical renewal operation of filtration media, favoring reutilization, and therefore, improving the sustainability in our facilities.
In Skikda, the process consists of reutilizing the existing filtration media in the interior of the filters to the maximum, then running the material through a cleaning and sieving process, to put it back into the filter and into layers, free of impurities, organic and solid waste, which causes the filters to work less efficiently over the years.
By applying this process, we have obtained over €300,000 in estimated savings in the past six years, which translates to cutting costs by 56.98%.
In this six-year period we have reduced generated waste by 1,770 tonnes, which translates to an 83.5% reduction in generation of waste from 2017 to 2022.