2023 was a year of anniversaries for CPL/Puragen Activated Carbons. Back in the summer, they celebrated 10 years of spent carbon reactivation at their Immingham facility, the site later being awarded a prestigious Green Apple environmental award as well as its ISO45001 accreditation for health & safety.
2023 also represented a significant milestone for another important area of the business, namely the rental of Clean-Flo® mobile carbon filters, which began 20 years ago. CPL had been selling carbon filters prior to this date, but 2003 was when they designed a genuinely portable unit and began the transition into a true ‘carbon & service’ business.
Mobile carbon filters offer a number of operational and financial benefits over fixed filter installations:
- No CAPEX for the customer, only OPEX – supplied on a rental basis;
- Modular, flexible arrangement – can add or remove filters as the situation demands;
- ‘Lead & lag’ or parallel layout possible for multiple filters, to optimise treatment flow;
- Simple Plug & play operation – no on-site carbon handling;
- All-in-one transportation and adsorption unit;
- Also ideal for trialling alternative activated carbons, or for periods of plant maintenance when a fixed filtration system is unavailable.
The first rental filter was a 2m3 VOCSorber® unit, supplied to a chemicals manufacturing site in West Yorkshire that is still a customer to this day!
CPL’s mobile filter rental business grew organically in the early years but really took off in 2013, when they started recycling spent carbons and were able to supply their service via the company’s REACT-Sys process, offering a circular solution that was pioneering in the industry.
The next major change was in 2018, when they acquired the manufacturing facility in Chesterfield, now called CPL Icon, which gave the company an in-house manufacturing and engineering capability.
The previous year, 2017, saw the launch of what was (at the time) the largest mobile carbon filter on the market, the VOCSorber 30, designed primarily for demanding landfill gas (LFG) purification applications. The fleet was further augmented a few years later with an even larger unit, the High Flow HF20V VOCSorber®, standing 8m tall, designed for major odour control and VOC abatement projects, for example at waste handling facilities or food production sites.
If you would like to find out more about their range of mobile carbons filters, for both gas phase (VOCSorber®) and liquid phase (AquaSorber®) purification applications, visit their website: https://activated-carbon.com/mobile-carbon-filters/.
