On-line toxicity monitoring using Amtox

As environmental legislation around the world becomes more stringent, it is vital that biological systems are able to treat the effluents which are discharged from wastewater-treatment plants. Conventional treatment such as BOD removal has been achieved successfully for many years, but the requirements for toxicity removal are more onerous. The Amtox system, which was designed to give operators of wastewater-treatment plants a tool for assessing the toxicity/treatability, uses an immobilized culture of nitrifying bacteria, maintained in a heated aerobic reactor, to determine whether or not a waste is degradable. The system has a broad range of applications from treatability tests to process monitoring and toxicity tracing and, by changing the culture, effluent toxicity monitoring. This paper details two case studies: (i) in an abattoir where an Amtox monitor was used to diagnose the source of toxicity, and (ii) on the River Trent.