Trade Effluent, Water & What Goes Down the Drain
Strength-based charging makes food and drink effluent expensive: consents, the Mogden logic, product losses paid for three times, and the water-energy link in every washdown.
11 min read · Jacob Willis, Net Zero Lead · Last reviewed July 2026
Everything a food or drink site washes away, it pays for three times: once to buy the water, once to heat it, and once to send it down the drain, and that third payment is where this sector gets uniquely expensive. Food and drink effluent carries sugars, fats, yeast, starches and product losses that are costly to treat, and the water company charges by strength as well as volume. That pricing turns effluent from a facilities afterthought into an energy manager's ally, because most of what reduces effluent charges (less water, less heat, less product in the drain) reduces the energy bill in the same motion.
In this lesson
- 01Consents and the Mogden logic
- 02Product down the drain is the expensive kind
- 03Strength management: segregate, recover, neutralise
- 04The water-energy nexus
- 05Sources and further reading