Packaging Industry
Treating ink contaminated water
Problem Statement
Golden Era Packaging faced a major challenge in treating its ink-contaminated wastewater, one of the most persistent problems in industrial wastewater treatment.
Ink-based wastewater is highly coloured & colloidal, with particles so fine & negatively charged they cannot settle naturally under gravity. This led to:
- Poor clarity of discharged water
- Elevated suspended solids
- Inefficient results from conventional treatment methods
Solution
Our R&D team designed a controlled study to test the ability of coagulants & flocculants to:
- Suppress particle surface charges to allow micro-floc formation.
- Bind and consolidate micro-flocs into larger agglomerates.
- Optimise settling rates to achieve clarity within minutes.
- Analyse treated water quality, including pH, conductivity, total dissolved solids (TDS), and total suspended solids (TSS)
Tools & instruments used included a VIS spectrophotometer (HACH DR6000), pH/EC/TDS meter, analytical balance, and controlled stirring equipment
Findings
After systematic testing, we identified the optimal treatment parameters:
- Best-performing coagulant: H6550 at ≥ 5.75 ppm
- Best-performing flocculant: H6605 at ≥ 1.9 ppm
- Settling rate achieved: ± 3.6 m/hr
Benefits for the Company
- Cleaner effluent water, enabling safe environmental discharge or reuse
- Cost savings, thanks to optimised chemical dosages and simplified filtration requirements
- Compliance assurance, aligning with environmental and industry standards
Water quality improvements
- Conductivity reduced from 585.7 → 385.4 μs/cm (~34% improvement)
- TDS reduced from 424.8 → 265.6 ppm (~38% reduction)
- TSS dropped from immeasurable to 92 mg/L, and as low as 1 mg/L post-filtration
- Colour completely removed, producing a clear effluent comparable to demin water
Turnaround time
- Some residual micro-floc particles didn’t fully settle. But they were easily captured via filtration using filter media in the 25–75 μm range, making ultra-fine filters (5–8 μm) unnecessary.
- This means future plant-scale applications can prioritise flow rate efficiency over ultra-tight filtration, reducing operational costs