ECO-SUSTAINABILITY
Since its foundation, GESM has operated with a strong sense of environmental responsibility, investing in state-of-the-art plant for wastewater treatment and fume abatement, with the aim of reducing the environmental impact of its processes.
The processes are constantly monitored by qualified personnel through dedicated control systems, ensuring compliance with environmental parameters and current regulations, often with standards that go beyond the required limits.
Below we present the main technologies and systems adopted to make our production process ever more efficient and sustainable.
Physico-chemical plant
A fully automated, PLC-controlled wastewater treatment system, equipped in its final stage with a software-managed automatic sampler to keep the quality of the outgoing wastewater constantly under control. The operating principle consists in separating the pollutants by adding suitable reagents according to the substance to be “abated”, and then separating them from the wastewater through settling, flocculation and filtration processes.
Combustion plant
With regenerative heat recovery for purifying the fumes from the departments that use paints and solvents, these types of plant exploit the ability of a mass of inert material (porcelain, cordierite) to store and cyclically release heat; heat recovery can reach up to 96%, thereby drastically reducing the plant’s running costs and, consequently, improving its environmental impact.
Filter press
Used to dewater sludge through a solid–liquid separation process, this system reduces the volume of liquids containing suspended solids. The plant consists of a series of plates alternating with cloths which, pressing against one another, form chambers in which the dewatered sludge cake is formed. The liquid sludge is pumped into the filter, where the solid part is retained and the liquid part is expelled.
Extraction systems
On each electroplating line, the fumes are conveyed into dedicated abatement towers known as SCRUBBERS. Abatement occurs through the impact between the abatement liquid, nebulised through nozzles, and the dust and pollutants present in the fumes.
The polluted air is conveyed into the washing tower and passes through the mobile media it contains, which are sprayed with jets of water fed by a pump submerged in the scrubber tank. This system continuously reuses the same abatement liquid, which after washing falls back into the tank where the airborne pollutants accumulate, later to be disposed of in the form of sludge.