Libramont Factory: A Fourth "Waterloop Factory"

The Group’s Libramont factory in Belgium has become the Group’s fourth ‘waterloop factory’, following the Burgos, Spain, factory in 2017, the Settimo, Italy, and Vorsino, Russia, factories in 2018.

All the water used to run the factory (for cleaning tanks, producing steam, utilities etc) comes from water recycled in a loop on site. The water obtained from public water supplies is only used within the composition of products or for employees’ needs. The factory, specialised in creating hair colour products for the mass European market, overcame the challenge of recycling wastewater thanks to a combination of two technologies: inverse osmosis (filtration with membranes) and evapoconcentration (distillation). This installation within the factory’s wastewater treatment facility, which ensures a biological and physico- chemical treatment of used water, enables the recycling of an average of 200m³ of water per day. That is 60 million litres per year, or the equivalent of 600 families’ annual consumption.