Slurry Management and Water Re-use
Polished Concrete Floors are modern and beautiful. The first step in the wet grinding and polishing process requires a significant amount of water and generates a slurry by-product that can be costly in disposal. Surtec has a two-fold solution that not only reduces the disposable waste, but also provides a re-usable water source. Saving over 80% of the water normally needed to complete the job.
First we’ll note that we prefer the ‘wet’ method of concrete polishing, as it does not create the harmful silica dust generated by dry grinding. Silica dust has been classified a Carcinogen.
Following is an example of the water and labor savings that was realized on an actual 125,000 sq ft floor.
In this case, the wet concrete grinding and polishing process began with 200 grit diamonds and continued through 1500 grit. That would normally create approximately forty 55 gallon drums (2200 gallons) of slurry waste by-product. This amount of slurry waste would cost a minimum of $5,000 in disposal fees.
The amount of water typically required to wet grind and polish this square footage is calculated to be about 2200 gallons. Utilizing Surtec’s Slurry Management Program, we were able to recycle and re-use 80% of our water, saving nearly 1800 gallons of water on the job site. In today’s drought condition this savings in water is huge.
How did we do that you might ask….
Surtec’s Slurry.Sep is a natural non-hazardous product that when stirred into the slurry waste by-product quickly separates the water from the solids, allowing clear water to be pumped off for re-use. Not only does the process save tremendously on water use, but it also greatly reduces the amount of waste that ultimately ends up in the land fill.
We were able to complete this process right on the job floor, where the work was happening, without having to transport the equipment to a backroom for processing. This may sound trivial, but when you realize we’re talking about 110 trips to the backroom, we saved about 50 hours of labor time.
At the jobs end we used Surtec’s Slurry.Dry to dry the remaining solids preparing them for compliant disposal. By removing most of the water with Slurry.Sep before drying the remaining waste with Slurry.Dry we managed to reduce the final slurry waste by over 80% and quickly prepared it for legal land fill disposal.
How it works…
And here’s a closer look at that flocculation process…
