CarboNet chemistry: Plug-and-play wastewater treatment for meat & dairy

Chicken nugget simplicity, prime rib results.

Meat and dairy wastewater is a gnarly mix of fats, proteins, and detergent that are made even more complex with shift changes and clean-in-place, functions that create maximum variability in the effluent stream that even a skilled crew would find challenging to treat.

Why it matters: Meat and dairy operators don’t employ specialized wastewater teams. Line workers are asked to guesstimate dosing schedules, and with aging equipment and outmoded chemicals like PAM, it’s easy to gum up the system or overdose and breach permit levels.

CarboNet’s chemistry resolves these issues:

Requires no make-down and plugs directly into your lines, eliminating the need for make-down equipment and maintenance.
Offers a forgiving dosage window so workers don’t have to babysit the pumps or experiment with complex dosing regimes.
Cuts PAM/polymer by up to 90%—a gain for the P&L and fixed-address toxicity limits.
Acts quickly and produces consistent results, leading to predictable costs and reliable KPIs.
Cost-competitive with liquid emulsion flocculants, even at a 4:1 ratio.
Overall: reduces CAPEX, OPEX, HS&E incidents, and emissions—while improving your margins.

The bottom line: Water treatment isn’t a core focus for meat and dairy producers. Solutions need to be cost-effective and not impact permit limits—but vitally they need to be safe, simple, and require little to no training for line workers who are focused on other tasks.

Reference project

A food manufacturer faced constant surcharges as unreliable chemical suppliers and understaffed make-down disrupted wastewater operations.

The problem: A food manufacturer in Northern California struggled to staff make-down operations which, when combined with an unreliable chemical supply chain, led to wastewater that regularly breached permissible levels of suspended solids.

The solution: While SimpleFloc was initially discussed to solve the issue of suspended solids in the waste stream, the conversation broadened to include make-down itself: the materials, the staffing, and the babysitting required to deal with FOG water’s high variability.

Make-down is a relic of treatment from the 1970s that leads to CAPEX, OPEX, and emission overages. It’s core ingredient—polyacrylamide—has weak bonds that create inconsistent flocs, forcing teams to overdose and, in turn, create flocs that are too wet or spongey—gumming up filters and presses that lead to work stops, swap outs, and shut downs.
SimpleFloc, in contrast, requires no make-down and plugs directly into the lines, cutting out make-own equipment, maintenance, dosing schedules, and adjustments.

The result: The switch to SimpleFloc had an immediate impact on the water and the P&L:

89.6% less PAM
18% less suspended solids
Wastewater surcharges greatly reduced

The bottom line: Just as with chemistry, water treatment decisions have primary and secondary consequences that aren’t always factored into the big picture or the bottom line.

By adding SimpleFloc, the manufacturer was able to remove an entire process, along with the associated costs and inefficiencies that were slowing them down and hitting the P&L.

“We cut suspended solids by 18% and polymer by 90%, then cut out make-down, which also saved our crew hours a week not messing with dosing.”

Food Operator, California

Chemistry to compete

CarboNet’s NanoNet platform generates programmable flocculants, coagulants, and targeting agents that adapt to any application and significantly improve your P&L.

Plug-and-play wastewater treatment for meat & dairy.