E-Learning

Current spot checks are no longer satisfactory to avoid the potential for high-level contamination of rivers or estuaries from industrial waste. Governing environmental bodies can impose heavy fines on companies that routinely exceed the set limits, and even reserve the right to shut down the liable plant. This produces a requirement for online monitoring of multiple outlet streams from the plant, before and after potential dilution points. Monitoring the river for contamination from other...

A significant population of the world lives within the fertile river valleys and is affected directly by the quality of water. Increased urbanization and industrialization has led to a degradation of water quality in recent decades due to contaminants from several sources - industrial, agricultural and anthropogenic. Traditional methods that include time consuming lab analysis from point measurements often lose out on event detection and fail to establish a complete picture of the health of t...

Measurement of Fats, Oils and Grease (FOG) in waste water is a crucial parameter in water quality control and environmental monitoring performed by water suppliers laboratories and environmental authorities. Traditionally this is carried out by passing a volume of water through a filter which collects both FOG and solid particulates; after drying the filter, the FOG is determined by Soxhlet analysis. However the Soxhlet method is a long and laborious process, requires skilled operators and th...

The persistence of organic pollutants, such as pharmaceuticals, within the environment is a growing area of research. Until the introduction of current EU Directives the impact of drug emission into the environment through wastewater treatment was largely unconfirmed and unrestricted. Compounds with high octanol-water partition coefficient (Kow), like many common pharmaceuticals, are not biodegraded during wastewater treatment and can bioaccumulate through adsorption to soils and sludge. Typi...

Acidic herbicides are used to control broad-leaved weeds. They are stable, water soluble, and with low binding to soil are found frequently in surface waters, often at concentrations above the EU Drinking Water Directive limit of 0.10 µg L−1. This presents a problem when such waters are abstracted for potable supplies. Understanding their sources, transport and fate in river catchments is important. We developed a new Chemcatcher® passive sampler, comprising a 3M Empore™ anion-exchange...

Taste and Odour challenges and the world's most sensitive detector

For medium to complex matrices, it is well know that GC/MS deconvolution is probably one of the most important and critical steps to get reliable identifications for screening assays. The ultimate task is to obtain best estimated spectra for the pure components present in the sample. Besides deconvolution, the identification algorithm used to match unknown spectra with a spectral library also can have big impact on the final identification results, especially for components at low to very low...

Recent advances in the sensitivity and selectivity and modern GC-MS instrumentation combined with the development of laboratory robotic systems have made it possible to miniaturise and automate traditional sample preparation methods without compromising compound limits of detection. In particular the application of fully automated Dispersive Liquid/Liquid Microextraction (DLLME) shows great promise for the extraction of a very wide range of organic pollutants from aqueous matrices. Combinatio...

The Medium Combustion Plant Directive as presented at the AQE exhibition at Telford in 2018.

Presented at AQE 2018 Conference in Telford. Implementation of the Medium Combustion Plant Directive and Specified Generator regulations, the monitoring requirements and how they will be regulated.