From the Piracicaba plant in Brazil, Paques drives wastewater transformation across Latin America. Paques manufactures locally, ensuring cost-effective, high-quality deployment of bioreactors. Their teams support installations across multiple sectors including food, beverage, paper and ethanol.

In this webinar Nivaldo Dias, Head of Sales & Marketing at Paques Latin America, brings a depth of knowledge and clarity to highlight the advantages of anaerobic digestion in wastewater treatment.

Watch the short introduction and discover how Paques transforms industrial effluent treatment using biological processes, highlighting challenges, advantages, and innovative anaerobic technologies that recover energy and reduce waste.

These systems leverage specialized microorganisms that break down organic pollutants in the absence of oxygen.
The process results in two outputs:

• a reduced pollutant load
• and biogas, primarily composed of methane (CH₄), which can be used for heat, power, or converted into biomethane for injection into the gas grid.

Aerobic treatment, widely used in municipal systems, involves the injection of oxygen into wastewater to fuel aerobic bacteria that break down organic material. While effective, this process consumes significant energy, up to 3 kWh per kg of BOD removed, and generates large volumes of excess sludge that require costly disposal.

In contrast, anaerobic treatment relies on oxygen-free environments where specialized microbes convert organic pollutants into biogas. Up to 85% of the COD load can be transformed into methane, which provides energy rather than consuming it. Moreover, anaerobic systems produce 5–10 times less sludge, drastically reducing post-treatment handling.

This makes anaerobic technologies especially attractive for high-strength industrial wastewater, where energy recovery and footprint reduction are critical. For facilities aiming to optimize operational expenditure and environmental impact, this is a strategic choice.

Hybrid systems provide a sustainable way to deal with heavy load

Choosing the right wastewater treatment system demands careful evaluation of each industry’s effluent profile.
In the Paques webinar, Nivaldo breaks it down with clarity:
“The first challenge is to understand, in my case, in my industry... whether I will use a biological process or a physical-chemical process.”

For sectors like food, beverage, paper, and dairy, a COD/BOD ratio of less than 3 makes biological treatment the best fit. But it doesn’t stop there. Pretreatment, space constraints, and the type of reactor are equally critical. Paques warns against blindly using UASB reactors designed for domestic sewage in high-load industries. “It will generate so much biogas that it will drag all this sludge... the efficiency will get much worse.”

Paques' advanced anaerobic technologies overcome these hurdles, handling high concentrations of grease and solids without pretreatment, operating in smaller footprints, and requiring less maintenance.

The BIOPAQ^® UASB reactor is a traditional upflow system where influent enters at the bottom, allowing microbial granules to digest organic material as it ascends. While efficient, it requires larger volumes for high loads. And what's more, space efficiency is critical in industrial facilities.


Paques’ BIOPAQ^® IC reactors, developed in the 1990s, revolutionized compact treatment by using a two-stage digestion tower. BIOPAQ^® IC is capable of handling COD loads at a 10 times higher rate, and requires 10 times less space than traditional USB reactors.

It combines upward and downward flow with internal recirculation, doubling the contact between biomass and substrate. This enables application rates of up to 30 kg COD/m³/day, making it ideal for industries with high-strength effluent and space constraints.

The BIOPAQ^® IC reactor also reduces hydraulic retention time, meaning wastewater is treated in just hours, not days. With a footprint 10 times smaller than conventional anaerobic systems (and over 1800 installations globally) it’s no surprise that industries across the world choose IC reactors for scalable, sustainable, energy-generating wastewater treatment.

At Paques, we transform industrial wastewater from a costly challenge into a valuable resource. In this webinar Nivaldo also addresses the processes of the following technologies in more detail. Each of these technologies help industries recover resources, reduce their environmental footprint, and move towards a circular economy.

• The BIOPAQ® RISE system upgrades existing reactors with external biomass separators, improving anaerobic digestion and enabling efficient biogas production even in underperforming installations
  
  Watch the BIOPAQ® RISE video


• For effluents with high concentrations of oils, grease, and solids, the BIOPAQ® AFR technology eliminates the need for pre-treatment, converting complex substrates directly into renewable energy
  
  Watch the BIOPAQ® AFR video


• For effluents with very high COD and solid content, the BIOPAQ® CBD reactor combines innovative plug-flow design with bottom scrapers to maximize biogas generation and prevent inert material accumulation
  
  Watch the BIOPAQ® CBD video