North British Distillery Company Ltd

North British Distillery Company Ltd

The Company
North British Distillery (NBD) in Edinburgh.

The North British Distillery Company was established in 1885 and is one of Scotland’s largest Scotch Grain Whisky producers. It manufactures, matures and delivers high quality Scotch whisky with key co-products comprising distillers dark grains, moist grains, grain spent wash syrup and liquefied carbon dioxide.

In 2015 the company celebrated producing 2.5 billion litres of whisky since 1887 when the distillery was established.

The Problem
Distilling alcohol requires very high quality water in order to create a high quality end product. All unnecessary contaminants must be removed and this creates large amounts of wastewater. The cost of discharging wastewater into the public sewer system for the company was high as it was being charged according to the Mogden Formula. The company was keen to reduce costs.

The Solution
With the majority of cost being incurred by NBD when the wastewater was discharged into the public sewers, we designed the plant to treat the wastewater before it reaches the municipal treatments works in order to reduce costs.

We designed and built onsite a Membrane Bio Reactor plant, which is based around the use of Mitsubishi SADF600 modules. It was supplied complete with covered tanks, screening and an excess sludge dewatering facility using an MSE Hiller centrifuge to reduce volume of solids and produce a stackable cake, which can be removed from site more easily and cost efficiently.

The plant is capable of treating up to 140 m3/hr with an input Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) of 2,800 mg/l and over 1,000 mg/l suspended solids after an anaerobic digestion plant. Discharge output results are <100 mg/l COD and <5 mg/l on suspended solids.

The whole plant was commissioned, designed, built and installed at NBD’s Edinburgh site within a six month period. The plant includes system control and automation software with full remote access capability to allow control of processes, monitor real-time data, and record events into a log file. This additional flexibility and peace of mind for NBD allows them to focus on day-to-day operations.