Save water at industrial premises

Reduce water use by product recovery

Guide

Any business that uses pipework to transfer products can use product recovery techniques to reduce overall costs and make significant water savings. In many cases, no cleaning is required after product recovery systems have been installed.

A product recovery system uses a piece of technology called a 'pig'. This is a plug or ball that is used inside the pipe and is pushed along under its own power, or via a propellant such as compressed air, nitrogen or water.

The use of a pig to recover materials from your pipework has a number of key benefits:

  • valuable raw materials or products are recovered for reuse
  • water and other chemicals that are used to clean the pipework can be significantly reduced
  • any additional water that is used to clean the pipework will have lower effluent loads and save you money on disposal costs
  • reductions in cleaning time that can cut the production downtime of a process