RO Zero Liquid Discharge at Texas Golf Club

Water Treatment Systems, Inc designed and built a 1,000,000 GPD reverse osmosis based water treatment plant that will feature (nearly) "Zero Liquid Discharge" of the waste water concentrate from the RO systems. RO concentrate water that is to be discharged to a sewer system has been reduced to only approximately 28,000 GPD. That is a design recovery of greater than 97%. This is a very important development for the RO and also for the Golf industries.In many parts of the country, and indeed worldwide, golf course managers struggle with the problems of availability, cost or quality of water for irrigation of their golf course. "Reverse Osmosis has solved the problem of utilizing brackish ground water and many Golf Clubs have planned to purchase and install their own RO water treatment plants only to run directly into a very major obstacle. The problem is finding a suitable location to send the RO concentrate water and obtaining the necessary permits. RO concentrate water is considered 'industrial waste' by the DER and EPA." The lower the amount of RO concentrate, the smaller the problem is. Reverse Osmosis systems are currently desalinating brackish or sea water at dozens of gold course facilities in the USA and world-wide. The product water from RO systems is very good "irrigation" quality. These facilities discharge their concentrate water, usually about 25% of the feed water, to an appropriate and permittable location. For a one million gallon per day RO system, this can be 250,000 gallons per day. A great many golf course facilities that need to treat their available water do not have an approved location to discharge it to. The original design for the Texas Golf Course called for total liquid discharge with the use of evaporators as the final treatment phase. Evaporators are expensive both in capital and operating cost. But our client was fortunate to obtain permitting for approximately 5% of the concentrate thus eliminating the evaporation phase which saved about a million dollars". The WTS (nearly) zero liquid discharge design using membrane systems is a low cost opportunity for golf clubs everywhere.