Overview of water usage and wastewater management in the food and beverage industry

Food and beverage industry is one of the major contributors to the growth of all economies. In European Union, it constitutes the largest manufacturing sector in terms of turnover, value added, and employment. However, the sector has been associated with various environmental issues including high levels of water consumption and wastewater production. In the present work, an overview regarding the production process, the water usage and the wastewater generation, and treatment of representative manufacturing industries from selected sectors of the food and beverage industry, is presented. The industries under investigation are: slaughterhouses, potato processing, olive oil production, cheese production, and beer manufacturing. As expected, between those different sectors, water consumption and wastewater generation vary greatly. Wastewater pollution load depends on the type of product being processed, the process and the equipment used, while the common characteristic is the strong organic content. In this view, the predominant treatment methods found in the recent literature are biological. This fact is reflected to the wastewater treatment technology employed which, in most of the cases, is biological with special attention to the application of the anaerobic digestion process.