Wintrust bet on biology: convenient and natural path to cleaner water
South Africa’s sewage, effluent and water crisis is no longer a distant warning. Ageing treatment infrastructure across the country is struggling to keep pace with rising inflow volumes containing increasingly complex and continuously changing widespread contaminants.
For Wintrust, a Stellenbosch-based company that has spent 35 years working at the intersection of agriculture, viticulture and water treatment, the solution does not lie in bigger plants or more expensive equipment. It lies in biology. The company started in the wine industry, importing equipment and products from France and Germany, before expanding into agriculturalfertilizers and, more recently, effluent treatment.
“We chase technology and we believe we are at the forefront in this regard,” says George Smit, director of Wintrust. Its client base today spans wineries, cooperatives, dairies, juice factories, and major beverage producers.
Why the biological core matters
According to Wintrust technical manager Eric Brown, every effluent plant in the world, however advanced its engineering, depends on one thing to actually bring water in the desired specifications with a healthy population of naturally occurring microbiomes.
“For any effluent plant that has been designed in the world, the core, the gut, or the brain, or the heart of any effluent plant is the biological part of the plant,” Brown explains. “You can add equipment, you can add fancy stuff, but the core of any effluent plant is still biological.”
The problem, Brown says, is the modern effluent streams contain an unpredictable mix of chemicals, hormones, metals and cleaning agents that can kill of the plant microbiome responsible for breaking down COD, contaminants, etc. When this happens, the system becomes what Brown calls “a sick plant,” unable to process the waste flowing through it, causing sludge buildup and also unable to reach desired specifications analysis at the outflow.
Wintrust’s approach is to keep the biological “heart” of the plant continuously healthy, utilising a wide spread of specific bacillus species.
“It’s all natural-born soil organisms and water-born organisms,” Brown says. The company’s focus is on how to apply microbial complexes. “The application of the product is where the key lies’” says Brown. “If the application is wrong, it will not work.”
A cost case as much as a technical one
Smit is direct about why he believes biological treatment deserves more attention from industry and government alike. Upgrading conventional effluent infrastructure can run into billions of rands, while a biological program costs only a fraction of that. The aim is to get the outflow water quality into acceptable specifications.
Researchers across several universities have raised concerns recently about the gap between treatment capacity and the volumes cities now need to process. Wintrust argues that closing the gap does not always require new capital infrastructure. In many cases, restoring a plant’s biological function can unlock capacity that already exists on paper but isn’t being realised in practice.
Private sector clients, Smit says, have been quicker to adopt the approach than municipalities. Wintrust has worked with major beverage producers on biological conversion of their effluent plants, with operations running for substantial time with checks and balances without incident.
The only realistic way forward
Both Smit and Brown believe water scarcity will become one of South Africa’s defining business challenges within the coming years, driven by population growth, rising food production demands, and the limited ability to expand the country’s water supply. Their argument is that reusing and cleaning water more effectively, rather than waiting for new infrastructure funding, is the only realistic way forward.
“There are no answers for the problems of effluent at the moment as we speak,” says Smit. “We have the idea. It’s just that people must just lock into the system of the idea. You don’t have to complicate things.”
Reality and Facts
For many years, dysfunctional sewage and effluent treatment plants have contributed to the pollution of our oceans, rivers, and other water sources.
If these unsustainable practices continue unchecked and uncontrolled, the risk of a major environmental and public health disaster becomes increasingly imminent. Urgent intervention is needed to restore and maintain these critical systems, protect our natural resources, and safeguard the well-being of current and future generations.
For more information on Wintrust’s effluent treatment and agricultural biological products, contact info@wintrust.co.za or +27 (0)21 887 4780.
