Puerto Rico supports a large pharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure. With favorable tax incentives and a sophisticated communications and transportation system, many of the most prescribed medicines in the U.S. are manufactured in Puerto Rico.

      Like most islands with modern infrastructure and manufacturing, Puerto Rico faces a finite supply of resources – especially water. The pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer has a leading manufacturing presence in Puerto Rico, with five plants employing more than 5,500 people that produce some of the company’s top selling medications including Celebrex, Lipitor, Neurontin, Norvasc, Zoloft, and Zithromax. At its facility in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, Pfizer initiated a water conservation and waste minimization program with a goal of reusing 100 percent of its wastewater.

      In its drive towards making the plant a zero discharge facility, Pfizer originally installed a reverse osmosis (RO) to treat process water before returning it to non-potable water uses. The RO system was installed to reduce the volume of discharge water – 50,000 gallons per day - that previously had to be loaded up in tankers around the clock and trucked to a municipal waste treatment facility about two hours away. The water supply to the Fajardo plant comes from surface water originating from the nearby Yunque rain forest. Before entering the plant, the water undergoes conventional treatment from the municipality.

            In 2002, Pfizer contacted ITT Industries’ Aquious unit to discuss its wastewater treatment scheme. Pfizer was displeased with the operation of its existing RO system. Installed without a thorough engineering analysis, the RO system never operated correctly from the start. According to Mainor Vega, products manager for Latin America and the Caribbean with ITT Aquious’ Water Equipment Technologies unit, headquartered in Boynton Beach, Fla, “When we visited the plant for the first time, they had a waste bin filled with old membranes. The customer was buying membranes on a monthly basis due to the inefficiency of the existing RO system, which resulted in astronomical operational costs.”

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