Water treatment chemicals
Coagulants, polymers, inhibitors and biocides that clean drinking water, wastewater and industrial cooling and boiler water; a $41 billion service-heavy market.
Specialty chemicals · Industrial & consumer specialties · No. 87
- Product family
- Feedstock: Minerals and salts
- not published as a world tonnage; most coagulant is sold as liquid (for example PAC at about 10% Al2O3), so tonnes are dominated by water content
- 1.0 t CO₂e per t
- HS 382499
Before tap water reaches you, a plant doses it with coagulants and disinfectants from a $41 billion chemical industry.
Chart: Illustration: Water treatment chemicals
Where it comes from
Chart: Map of where it comes from
Coagulants are simple: aluminium hydroxide or iron is dissolved in acid near customers; polyacrylamide starts from acrylonitrile, about 0.75 t per t of acrylamide.
Three things to know
- Municipal drinking water and sewage are the biggest users, at 23.0% of market value, about $9.5 billion.
- Polyacrylamide carries about 4.8 t CO2e per tonne, while alum is about 0.79 t, so polymers are far more carbon-intensive.
- The EU limits leftover acrylamide in drinking water to 0.10 µg/l, setting the purity of polymers allowed in potable treatment.
The journey
- 1 Raw materialsBauxite, scrap iron, acids, acrylonitrile
- 2 Coagulants, polymersAlum, PAC, ferric salts, polyacrylamide
- 3 Formulated blendsScale inhibitors and biocides mixed
- 4 DosingSettles solids, stops scale, kills microbes
- 5 Clean waterDrinking water, sewage, cooling and boilers