ABSTRACT
During the past few years Nestle Foods and BioThane have studied the anaerobic treatability of wastewater from several of Nestle's production facilities. Nestle Foods is an international corporation with production plants worldwide, and makes products ranging from chocolate to freeze dried coffee. The work on coffee wastewater started in 1985 using a skid mounted pilot plant which incorporates a 6 cubic meter BioThane upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor. After several pilot projects at other Nestle facilities the work at Freehold resumed early in 1987 using a glass 10 liter pilot reactor, and continued until December of that year. The treatability of coffee wastewater was studied under both mesophilic (±35°C) and thermophilic (±55°C) conditions. The chapter presents operating data from four pilot trials, and offers some hypotheses regarding the operational behavior of the anaerobic treatment process when treating coffee wastewater.
