From “Overdosing Coagulant” to “Precise Dosing”: Indonesian Textile Mills Recalculate the True Cost of Wastewater Treatment

On many Indonesian textile and dyeing companies’ cost statements, wastewater treatment is grouped under a simple line item: “environmental cost”. A few numbers, little detail. As sludge transport, chemical prices and energy bills keep rising, more managers are realizing that rough, unoptimized dosing is quietly eroding profit margins.

In traditional practice, many plants operate under the principle that “a bit more chemical is safer”. When influent color increases, they increase coagulant and flocculant dosage; when COD fluctuates, they add yet another round of chemicals. While this approach can maintain short-term compliance, it comes with three hidden costs:

1. High specific chemical consumption
   Overall chemical cost per cubic meter of wastewater climbs year after year, but few people can explain exactly which chemical delivers what benefit.

2. Increased sludge burden
   More chemicals mean more chemical sludge. Dewatering, loading and off-site disposal all become more expensive and logistically challenging.

3. Reduced process sensitivity
   Operators stop paying attention to water quality trends and rely on “more chemicals” as a universal remedy, masking underlying process weaknesses.

To break this pattern, some Indonesian textile companies are starting to recalculate the real cost of wastewater treatment and rethink their strategy:

• They introduce high-efficiency printing and dyeing wastewater decolorizing agents with around 50% solid content to take over the job of color removal, instead of forcing coagulants to do everything.

• Through lab tests and on-site trials, they identify the optimal balance between the high-solids decolorizing agent and conventional coagulants, rather than simply scaling up one product.

• They gradually adopt “total cost per cubic meter” as a core KPI, looking at chemicals, sludge handling, power and labor together instead of fixating on the unit price of a single chemical.

Experience from these plants suggests that once they abandon the “just throw in more coagulant” mindset and move toward high-solids decolorizing agents combined with more precise dosing strategies, overall wastewater treatment costs become easier to control:

• Compliance risk is reduced, helping avoid penalties or production stoppages caused by sporadic exceedances.

• Sludge generation is moderated, easing pressure on dewatering and disposal capacity.

• Operations teams become more aware of water quality dynamics, shifting from “firefighting” to prevention and optimization.

As Indonesia’s textile industry continues to upgrade, this shift from quantity-based thinking to precision-based thinking in wastewater treatment is quietly reshaping cost structures. In that shift, printing and dyeing wastewater decolorizing agents with high solid content (around 50%) are emerging as a key tool rather than a marginal add-on.