A new dawn for recycling membranes?

摘要

Two patent applications from Suez this month together detail a process to recover high value polymeric materials from water treatment membranes at the end of their useful life. The growth of the membrane market for water treatment in recent years comes with some inconvenience: once the membrane elements are no longer effective, they are typically disposed of in landfill or incinerated. More sustainable alternatives, such as trying to recycle polymers from exhausted membranes, have been investigated in the past, for both ultra-filtration and reverse osmosis membranes. Most notably, a decade ago a programme run by the now defunct National Centre of Excellence in Desalination Australia (NCEDA) focused on finding new applications for discarded reverse osmosis membranes, but nothing at scale has come of it. GWI understands that it cost more to break up and separate the materials than what they were worth.