The pharmaceutical industry is heavily regulated, and all manufacturers must meet specific compliance guidelines. The quality and purity of water – a key component of many medicines, and essential for plant cooling and cleaning – is particularly important. “Water security and input cost are important sustainability factors for pharmaceutical manufacturers to consider. Therefore, it is crucial to employ advanced technologies that enable one to ‘get the most from every drop of water’,” explains Veolia Services Southern Africa business development manager Leon Xu.

The company asserts that its solutions for the pharmaceutical industry deliver cost-savings and regulatory compliance, as well as improve access to high quality utilities, such as water. “All of our solutions for compendial water production are designed to meet the product quality specifications of all pharmacopeia requirements and guidelines – giving customers peace of mind and compliance assurance,” states Xu.

Veolia recently implemented an ultrafiltration system for a pharmaceutical company whose purified water treatment plants were failing microbial quality tests. Replacing the purified water treatment system with Veolia Orion technology and implementing a robust treatment process and hot water sanitisation capability, enable a secured supply of purified water for the company.

Orion is a skid-mounted, multi-technology purified water production system that offers softening, reverse osmosis and continuous electrodeionisation, or CEDI, that can be fully or partially hot water sanitised. “Depending on the model, the Orion system produces between 500 l and 20 000 l of purified water per hour. As of today, more than 300 systems have been installed globally,” adds Veolia Services Southern Africa director: business development Miles Murray.

The Orion S-Series has a recycle mode feature that limits water wastage during purification. During product recycling, the product flows are all reduced to nominal 50% of the flow, resulting in less fresh water consumption. “A typical purified water system has an overall water recovery of 70%, which means 30 litres of water goes to drain for every 70 litres of purified water produced. In comparison, only 8 litres of water go to drain for the same production volume, when an Orion S-Series is employed, thanks to its higher recovery system of 90%,” explains Xu.

The technology includes an integrated recovery reverse osmosis (RO) which takes reject water and recovers waste to recycle, up to 90% overall recovery. It also features an RO Reject Recycle Pump that recycles and re-pressurises the RO rejects back into the high-pressure feed. Through pressure conservation, the overall energy requirement is greatly reduced.

Veolia also offers the IonPROT LX, a compact, plug-and-play system capable of producing a constant supply of 500 l to 1 000 l per hour of purified water, suitable for small-scale applications, and the Polaris water distiller, which produces water for injection (WFI) and highly purified water.

The company is not only a provider of specialist and technical services, but also works as a partner in the management of water, waste and energy.

Veolia services include:

• Operation and maintenance of all utilities and infrastructure, including heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, or HVAC, in Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and non-GMP areas, solvent recovery facilities, WFI and steam production, cooling towers and chillers
• Calibration services
• Operation and maintenance of complete water cycle
• Management of hazardous and non-hazardous Waste Lab Services

The company’s digital monitoring tool Hubgrade, features a range of service modules, from basic data collection to a 24-hour support service from Veolia engineers. Embedded predictive maintenance features such as targeted alerts along with logs of previous maintenance can help staff to make informed decisions on minimum needs.