How Engineering Teams Are Building Reuse Into the Next Generation of Facilities

Water reuse and chemical recovery are showing up earlier in the design process than ever before. For facilities under pressure to reduce waste, minimize hauling, and meet ESG expectations, reuse isn’t a future upgrade, it’s a design requirement.

Whether you’re an EPC firm planning a new fab or an in-house team scoping a treatment upgrade, the path to circularity starts long before the system is installed. And for many of the teams we work with, the most important design decision is what to do about dissolved metals and residual peroxide.

That’s where we come in.

Why It Has to Start in Design

Once you’ve broken ground on a facility, many of your sustainability outcomes are already locked in. Equipment layout, treatment stages, storage capacity, these decisions shape what’s recoverable, what’s reusable, and what becomes waste.

It’s easy to design a system that meets discharge limits. It’s harder to design one that supports acid regeneration or water reuse, especially if contaminants like copper or peroxide are left unaddressed.

We’ve seen the difference firsthand. When recovery blockers are handled early, the system works better. There’s less waste to manage, fewer surprises during commissioning, and more room to adapt as goals evolve.

The Invisible Blockers to Reuse

Two things come up over and over again: trace metals and peroxide.

Metals like copper, silver, or manganese may be present in small amounts, but they’re enough to ruin membranes, interfere with polishing systems, or contaminate otherwise recoverable acid. Even at low levels, they can quietly shut down any shot at reuse.

Peroxide is another challenge. It’s part of many acid blends from the start, but once it’s spent, it creates problems — not just with reuse, but also with recovery, hauling, and downstream compatibility. If it’s not removed, the whole stream often gets treated as hazardous, even when the underlying acid is still valuable.

How We Support Engineering Partners

ElectraMet’s role in these projects isn’t limited to hardware. We’re here as a technical partner, to help you design smarter systems that are prepared for the realities of today’s regulatory and sustainability landscape.

We can support your team with:

• Application-specific guidance on metal removal and peroxide destruction

• System modeling to show how and where we integrate into the treatment train

• CO₂ impact calculations based on comparative hauling and chemical usage

• Total cost of ownership (TCO) comparisons that help justify system design choices to your clients

You won’t be handed a catalog or generic spec sheet. You’ll get engineers who understand your timelines, your site constraints, and your customers’ priorities.

What We Bring to the Design Table

We’re not here to upsell equipment. Our team works directly with yours to understand the stream, the constraints, and the goals. Then we help design a solution that targets the right contaminants in the right place — before they become someone else’s problem further down the line.

This is the heart of our ARRO™ program — Asset Recovery for Reuse or Offtake — which combines the right hardware with real support for circular system design. When metals and peroxide are removed cleanly and efficiently, valuable process chemicals can be reused, and water can re-enter the system instead of being hauled away.

We’ve helped design teams reduce hauling volumes, preserve acid for regeneration, and meet internal sustainability KPIs, all by making a few smart choices early in the process.

Let’s Get It Right From the Start

We love working with teams at the design phase. That’s when the real impact happens, not just in terms of performance, but in unlocking the bigger picture: recovery, reuse, and resilience.

If you’re planning a system that needs to be flexible, circular, or future-proof, we’d be glad to collaborate. You bring the facility vision. We’ll help you make sure it’s built to recover everything it can.

Planning for recovery or reuse? Let’s design it in — not patch it in later.
Talk to our team about getting started.