Sewage Water Processing in Northwest Germany

In Nordenham the OOWV, our regional water supplier, runs a test facility to find out how to clean the water that leaves a sewage plant so that our industry can use this water instead of our limited groundwater.

The OOWV and the university in Dresden made a huge prototype system in this container with different chemicals and filters to purify the water from the sewage plant because the water from the sewage plant is full of chemicals and bacteria. Usually, to get rid of them, the water needs to go back into the natural water cycle.

The problem is that our industry uses groundwater for example to cool hot things down. So our limited groundwater is wasted. 

The OOWV tries to avoid this by adding different chemicals and using ultra-filtration so that our industry uses this water instead of our limited groundwater. This re-used water has too few minerals for us to drink but our industry can use it because they do not need these minerals.