Monitoring & metering


PROTECTING BRITAIN’S WATERWAYS


In 2022, raw sewage was pumped into English rivers and seas for 1.75 million hours, or 200 cumulative years. Despite awareness of the need for environmental safeguarding growing every year, UK waterways still suffer pollution of the foulest kind. And it isn’t only sewage that waste companies have to worry about: here Matt Allen, product manager for elemental analysers at SciMed, the UK’s largest distributor of lab equipment, explains why testing water for halogen species will be a serious consideration in the near future.


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ndustry in the UK has come a long way towards sustainability in the last century. Gone are the days when processing plants would belch unfiltered arsenic and sulphurous fumes into the skies and pour black, smoking waste into rivers. Indeed, in 2023 there exist regulations to test all manner of waste produced by industrial processes, and directions to safely treat that waste which does not pass the test before it can be disposed of. Two regulations in particular, ISO9562 and EPA1650, deal with adsorbable organically bound halogens (AOX), a measurable halogen species.


The threat of halogens escaping into the environment should not be underestimated. Toxic and carcinogenic, these chemicals can easily be subsumed into the food webs in aquatic environments where they deal significant damage to the local ecosystem. Furthermore, there are no perfect safeguards to detect these


August 2023 Instrumentation Monthly


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