LOCAL TECHNOLOGY DRIVING MORE EFFICIENT AND SUSTAINABLE WATER TREATMENT

A partnership between two innovative developers of water treatment technology is paying real dividends for local businesses, councils and communities.

Apex Water is a local leader in water and wastewater treatment. The Timaru-based business designs, builds and installs plants for large factories, food and beverage businesses, wineries, dairy processing plants, and more recently, large scale municipal wastewater operations for local communities across the country.

For over two decades, the organisation’s founder, director and principal engineer, Dr Matthew Savage, has been working alongside another pioneering local company to provide a vital component of their water treatment process.

“Around 20 years ago, I was designing wastewater treatment plants all over the world,” says Matt. “We had previously been installing centrifuges that all came out of Europe.”

Industrial centrifuges can be used to spin wastewater at high speeds to separate water from organic and inorganic waste, before channelling the water for further treatment and the waste for disposal or other commercial uses.

“We started working with GTech, partly because they were local, and discovered their product was every bit as good as the leading European equivalent, it was very competitively priced and very well supported.”

Originally established in New Zealand, with a manufacturing base in Christchurch, GTech provides a range of high-quality industrial separation machinery around the world to businesses looking to use resources more sustainably, reduce waste, recover valuable by-products and improve efficiency.

Matt says working together with GTech has provided a host of benefits to Apex Waters’ clients.

“With the GTech centrifuges, we are able to reduce the amount of waste produced by ten to twenty-times,” says Matt. “Otherwise our clients would be paying hundreds of thousands per year in waste disposal – that obviously is quite a payback.”

Time to market is also a key advantage, particularly with shipping delays of up to six months not uncommon in sourcing machinery from Europe.

“Having it manufactured here has been an absolute godsend over the last couple of years,” says Matt.

Although built to be hard wearing and designed to make servicing more efficient, Matt says centrifuges do require regular maintenance due to constant running with high-wear materials.

“Having a highly responsive team in New Zealand that can provide service and support – rather than having to fly in specialists from overseas – is also fantastic.”

Working together, the two businesses have created a range of portable, ‘plug-and-play’ systems, tailored specifically for the needs of the local wastewater sector. The GTech skid includes one of the organisation’s industry leading separation machines on a stand-alone platform, fully plumbed and wired, with an inbuilt smart management system.

“A lot of our projects have very quick turnaround times,” says Matt. “Having a full solution delivered to site that’s already prewired, pre-plumbed, pre-commissioned is fantastic. Being able to manufacture the equipment safely in the workshop, out of the way of all the other work going on on-site, is also a real advantage.”

Ultimately the partnership has been positive for not only water treatment operations, but also the communities that ultimately carry the costs for municipal treatment and rely on clean water.

“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in New Zealand investing in our water infrastructure,” says Matt. “If we can do that safely, efficiently and with less cost, that has an enormous benefit across the country.”