THE pharmaceutical industry is heavily regulated, and all manufacturers must meet the compliance guidelines set out by the various pharmacopeia and industry bodies. The quality and purity of water must be guaranteed. However, access to clean water is becoming increasingly costly and difficult to secure.
According to Leon Xu, business development manager for Veolia Services Southern Africa, water security and input cost are important sustainability factors for pharmaceutical manufacturers to consider.
Water source quality remains a potential risk factor for plant performance. “With aging municipal water treatment infrastructure and increasing urban population, it has become increasingly challenging for the municipal works to maintain consistent quality at all times. To achieve uninterrupted production of purified water for production use, pharmaceutical manufacturers must ensure that their input water is monitored vigilantly, and that their purified water plants are operated and serviced diligently,” said Miles Murray, director for business development at Veolia Services Southern Africa.
Veolia’s solutions for the pharmaceutical industry deliver cost-savings and regulatory compliance, as well as improving access to high quality utilities. “All of our solutions for compendial water production are designed to meet the product quality specifications of all pharmacopeia requirements and guidelines, giving customers peace of mind and compliance assurance,” said Xu.
Purification technology
Veolia recently implemented an ultrafiltration system for a pharmaceutical company whose purified water treatment plants were failing microbial quality tests. After implementing the ultrafiltration system and replacing the purified water treatment system with Veolia Orion® technology, the company has a secured supply of purified water, resulting from the robust treatment process and hot water sanitisation capability.
Orion® is Veolia’s flagship technology that brings together scientific advances for the pharmaceutical industry. This is a skid-mounted, multi-technology purified water production system that offers softening, reverse osmosis and continuous electrodeionisation (CEDI) that can be fully or partially hot water sanitised. “Depending on the model, the Orion® system produces between 500 and 20 000 litres of purified water per hour, and more than 300 systems have been installed globally,” said Murray.
Sustainability is at the core of Veolia’s water technologies. The Orion® S-Series has a recycle mode feature that limits water wastage during purification. During product recycling, the product flows are reduced to a nominal 50 percent of the flow, resulting in less freshwater consumption. A typical purified water system has an overall water recovery of 70 percent, which means 30 litres of water goes to drain for every 70 litres of purified water produced. In comparison, only eight litres of water are wasted for the same production volume, when an Orion® S-Series is employed due to its higher recovery system.
It includes an integrated recovery reverse osmosis (RO) which takes reject water and recovers waste to recycle, with up to 90 percent overall recovery. It also features an RO Reject Recycle Pump that recycles and re-pressurises the RO rejects back into the high-pressure feed. Through pressure conservation, the overall energy requirement is greatly reduced. Energy and water efficiencies are displayed on all Orion® models. This feature allows operators to monitor performance instantaneously and react quickly to inefficiencies.
In addition to the Orion®, Veolia offers the IonPROTM LX, a compact, plug-and-play system capable of producing a constant supply of 500 to 1 000 litres per hour of purified water, and the Polaris water distiller, which produces water for injection and highly-purified water.
On-site management services
Veolia has worked with large multinational pharmaceutical manufacturers globally as a provider of specialist and technical services and a partner in the management of water, waste and energy. “With access to global expertise and best practices across all industries, we give customers peace of mind with guaranteed cost-reduction, improved utilities availability, regulatory compliance, and reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions. Customers receive consistent risk appraisal, reporting and governance,” said Xu. With an on-site presence, value-added services include optimisation studies in water usage, waste management and recycling. Services include:
- Operation and maintenance of all utilities and infrastructure, including HVAC in Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and non-GMP areas, solvent recovery facilities, water for injection (WFI) and steam production, cooling towers and chillers.
- Calibration services.
- Operation and maintenance of complete water cycle.
- Management of hazardous and non-hazardous Waste Lab Services.
