Case Study - Trade Waste Monitoring

Trade waste has always asked utilities to manage what they can’t always see. A scheduled audit or a grab sample captures a single moment, but trade waste doesn’t behave like a standard meter reading. It shifts with production cycles, cleaning processes and equipment faults, and it can move in and out of range over the course of a single day.

The stakes sit under the compliance line. SA Water authorises and regulates trade waste discharges under the Water Industry Act 2012 and its Restricted Wastewater Acceptance Framework. Trade waste itself can carry fats and oils, suspended solids, nitrogen, metals, hydrocarbons and high-strength organics from commercial and industrial sites. A non-compliant discharge can affect sewer assets, treatment processes, worker safety and final effluent quality well before the next inspection is due, and a customer can breach their limits without knowing quickly enough to respond.

Before this program, SA Water relied mainly on periodic sampling, customer reporting, site inspections and reactive investigations after an incident or complaint. Monitoring information for major customers was often spread across customer-owned portals and systems, which limited SA Water’s ability to independently see, validate and verify the data in real time.

“The historical way of doing it was point in time, labour-intensive and manual,” said Stelios Trikoulis, Chief Commercial Officer at Kallipr. “You would have to attend one of these trade waste sites, they could be a very big industrial manufacturing facility, and you would need to do a point-in-time study.”

Kallipr closes the gap by connecting existing trade waste equipment to a continuous telemetry system. The Captis Recharge device is built for multi-sensor sites, so a single installation can capture flow rates, water quality readings and system health data together, with Captis S2 covering sites across the network.

Every reading flows into Kallipr Kloud, giving SA Water one platform for all trade waste customer data rather than a patchwork of customer-managed systems. Crucially, that data is now directly accessible to and administered by SA Water. Where monitoring was previously controlled by individual trade waste customers, the utility now holds independent visibility and validation over discharge quality and quantity.

Because the parameters that matter are variable rather than cumulative, the system watches for movement rather than totals.

“Those parameters are not an accumulative measure. They’re changing over time,” said Trikoulis. When a reading moves outside a set threshold, Kallipr Kloud raises an alarm in real time.

The program is already surfacing events that the old model would have missed entirely. Readings that once sat inside customer-owned systems, and issues that would only have come to light after the fact, now reach SA Water as they happen.

That shift, from periodic visibility to near real-time data, gives SA Water a stronger footing across four fronts at once: compliance, customer engagement, network protection and charging. It also reduces the manual effort, time and back-and-forth that came with chasing data across multiple customer-owned systems.

Following successful trials, Kallipr and SA Water are working towards deployment across 75 prioritised customers over the next 12 months, with scope to extend to the top 100 to 150 customers after that.