Highbridge Water: From Spring to You
Click here to see the video!Have you ever wondered how Highbridge water gets from a spring in the back of a Limestone quarry in the bluffs above the Kentucky River to your door? I know you realize that it is brought to you in a big truck by one of our smiling drivers, or that you pick it up from the shelf at one of our grocery customers. But how does it get from the spring into that bottle? Well, it goes something like this. . . . Sitting under the spring is a 3500 gallon tank that says Highbridge Springs on the side – that tank serves as a catch basin for the natural flow- ing water which comes from an underground aquifier. From that catch basin we have several hundred feet of pipe that carries the water to a near- by reservoir. Actually we built a 10 foot high dam that created this reservoir which holds several million gallons of Kentucky’s finest spring water. From the pump house we move the water through about 750 feet of pipe to the “water plant” as we call it. This is where we process and bottle the water. The first steps are to send the water through our reverse osmosis system as well as an ozonation treatment. Through these steps we eliminate 99.5% of the dissolved solids found naturally in the water and turn it into the great tasting drinking water you have come to know as Highbridge. We then pipe the water once again into one of several large holding tanks where it is stored until it is channeled into one of various sized bot- tles. As our on-hand inventory is depleted we schedule and plan our pro- duction runs to restock our storage areas so that we never run out of water. We have production lines for each size container. The pure, clean water is delivered from the storage tanks directly to each of those production areas as needed.
Each production line has its own packing station. The bottles are put into cartons or in cardboard trays, wrapped, sealed and then palletized. From there they go into storage to await shipping/delivery. In a boost to recycling, we reuse the three and five gallon jugs. When they are returned to us for refilling they are thoroughly cleaned and sanitized in our mini car wash, a combination bottle cleaner and filling machine. Once filled they are capped and stored in racks until our route trucks are loaded for delivery. When Bill Griffin began operations in Wilmore 25 years ago he was told the cave wouldn’t be much good unless he figured out some way to get rid of that water in the back. Well, it took him a while to figure it out, but we think he came up with a pretty good idea – and we hope you agree.
Reverse Osmosis
Reverse osmosis is, by definition, the opposite of osmosis. So what is osmosis? It is the movement of a solvent through a semipermeable membrane until there is an equal concentration of fluid on both sides of the membrane. In other words, assimilation by absorption.
In reverse osmosis, the idea is not to equalize water product on both sides of the membrane, but rather to aid in purifying the original solution by passing it through, with the membrane acting as a filter. Forcing ground spring water through such membranes removes virtually all totally dissolved solids from the solution as these particles cannot pass. This process, in continuous operation at Highbridge, results in the crisp, fresh taste sensation for which the water is so well-known.
Analysis
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