The market for wastewater treatment is booming in the Middle East, says UAE-based Concorde Corodex Group (CCG), one of the first companies in the region to offer water treatment services.

Since its inception the company has been involved with some of the largest projects, including a recent contract worth more than $42 million from Abu Dhabi Sewerage Services Company to construct a sewage-treatment plant.
CCG’s scope of work there includes the design, fabrication, construction and commissioning of a Membrane Bioreactor (MBR) Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) for the largest planned labour accommodation facility in the UAE. The facility will treat the waste water from the Construction Workers’ Residential City (CWRC), a planned Dh 418 million ($113.8 million) labour compound in the Al Mafraq area of Abu Dhabi.
The plant, when completed, will have the capacity to recycle used water and sewage of up to 30,000 cu m/day and will treat the waste water produced by up to 32,000 workers, technicians and supervisors. Once this water is purified almost to the level of potable water, it will be re-used to serve the needs of machinery and cooling facilities within the CWRC site.
“The year 2007 was a breakthrough year for us as we managed to close in on various large projects.  One of our recent major projects was the completion of an 8,500 cu m/day water desalination plant for Occidental in Oman,” says Noor Ul Ain Mohammad, group marketing officer.
CCG also completed a vacuum sewerage network for Palm Jumeriah Island with the world’s largest vacuum station collecting sewage from all the urban dwellings in the Palm Jumeirah project which encompasses 2,500 villas. 
Other projects included the completion of the Al Yasat Sograh desalination plant in Abu Dhabi, which was a very challenging project due to the remote location of the plant and also the size (10,000 cu m/day seawater desalination).  It was also the first plant in the UAE to be commissioned to conform to the new low-boron standards that were implemented in 2007. 
CCG also supplied most of the odour-control treatment solutions for pumping stations and sewage treatment plants under a joint venture between a Dutch technology partner and Corodex industries. 
The company has projects in Oman, Sudan (under the UN mandate), Northern Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq. These projects include RO desalination plants, river water purification systems, wastewater treatment plants, water recycling systems, odour control systems, and vacuum sewerage systems.
“Scarcity of potable water is a dilemma for the whole world, especially the Middle East,” says Mohammad.
“Right from our early years of operations we have realised the potential in this part of the world and have been developing new technologies,” he says.
”Currently we are working very closely with consultants and developers to launch a series of products that will help meet the new stringent Emirates Green Building Council requirements.  This is a derivative of the LEED’s certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).  These are products that can help recycle waste water to a very high degree, something we like to call ‘Sewage back to Potable” or SBP: potable water quality for non-potable applications.  It is basically an evolution of the current grey water systems that exist in the market.”
Established in 1974 in Abu Dhabi, Concorde started as a water treatment chemical supplier. Four years later it opened an office in Dubai by the name of Corodex and that was the birth of the Concorde Corodex Group. Employing over 900 people CCG has offices in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Al Ain, Sharjah, Oman, Qatar, Jordan, UK, and Canada. It also has partners in over 30 countries in the Middle East, Northern Africa and Asia.
Besides manufacturing world-class water purification, water desalination and wastewater treatment plants, it is the largest stockist in the Middle East of a wide range of filtration products and components, laboratory and testing instruments, specialty chemicals, swimming pool chemicals and commodity chemicals.
“We have clients ranging from medium-level industries to large-scale municipalities. Almost all the time they come to us with a problem and we design a unique solution to cater to their needs. As we specialise in treating wastewater streams, whether it’s waste water from a factory or sewage from urban dwellings, we always have a challenging task to custom engineer the solution after careful analyses of impurities in the water. In the past we have custom-engineered solutions for industries like pharmaceutical factories, metal foundries, car wash stations, food and beverage factories, oil and gas refineries, ships, armed forces, airports and public transport stations, leisure parks, property developers, and municipalities,” says Noor Mohammed. 
Commenting on the market, he says “it is extremely difficult to ascertain a market size for the current market for wastewater treatment.  The growing populations in the Middle East, especially in Dubai, show that market demand is not being met by supply.  The current municipal plants in the UAE are quite overloaded, and running at over capacity in some instances. Besides rising populations, the need to reuse the sewage for non-potable applications such as district cooling, process water and irrigation, due to the scarcity of fresh water, is the main driving force behind the exponential growth of the wastewater treatment sector. And that’s what we specialise in.
“We have supplied a number of solutions to reputed property developers in and outside the UAE to recycle their development’s waste stream and use it for applications such as irrigation, toilet flushing, and district cooling. Not only does it put less strain on fresh water supply, but it also saves property-owners tremendous costs.”
CCG says it is committed to continuously supplying premium-quality products and innovative technologies in the field of water purification and wastewater treatment. It says its focus has been on offering the best solutions in the fields of water supply engineering (desalination and surface water treatment), vacuum sewerage technology, and wastewater engineering. 
“In the future we have plans to extend our local presence in the Middle East-North Africa region to support our clients and meet rising demand.  Also, we are currently negotiating with several technology partners to further increase our product offering, by jointly developing water treatment products tailored to Mena requirements.  This investment in research and development is an investment not only for Corodex, but for the region as well.”