Trade Effluent Monitoring Solutions tailored to your process

Trade effluent is any liquid waste (effluent) produced by a business or industrial process and discharged – typically into a public sewer. Domestic sewage, including wastewater from kitchen sinks, showers, and toilets, and uncontaminated surface/rainwater are not classified as trade effluent. Both large and small premises can produce trade effluent, from large factories and farms to car washes and laundrettes.

Unregulated trade effluent can cause severe damage to sewage systems and the environment. Fats and other solids can block pipes, potentially leading to flooding, while chemicals may corrode sewage assets and disrupt biological wastewater treatment processes. If unregulated trade effluent reaches natural waterways, it can be toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms, as well as trigger excessive algal growth that reduces oxygen levels for all other wildlife. Untreated effluent can also pose a health and safety risk to those who work on the sewage network and to the public.

Under the Water Industry Act 1991, it is a legal requirement for businesses to obtain a discharge consent from their local sewerage undertaker. It is breaking the law to discharge trade effluent without a consent. The consent will stipulate requirements for the quality and quantity of the effluent. These are often numeric limits for common parameters, with compliance very likely to be checked. If you need to apply for, understand, or update your discharge consent, contact our Environmental Management consultants.

Your discharge consent may contain monitoring requirements and numerical limits for one or more of the following parameters:

• Volume and flow rate
• pH
• Temperature
• Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD)
• Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD)
• Suspended solids
• Settled solids
• Sulphate

Our Trade Effluent Monitoring service will be tailored to your business’s requirements. Whether you need to apply for a discharge consent, set up a monitoring system from scratch, upgrade existing equipment, or solve a problem, we can help.

Our service can involve a site survey to assess your needs, flow and load investigations, treatment process design, and/or selection of appropriate monitoring instrumentation, data frameworks, and telemetry – all with attention to MCERTS standards, cost-effectiveness, and ease of maintenance.

We can ensure safe and efficient installation of your system and subsequent calibration, training for your team, and ongoing maintenance. We’ll be on hand for emergency support, helping you to stay compliant and reduce downtime in any possible situation. With telemetry, we can also run diagnostics remotely, leading to even faster issue resolution.