Monitoring for Certainty - ABB Limited

The water industry faces uncertainty in a changing legislative climate. Only the right monitoring systems can ensure that its operations comply with any future requirements, writes Jim Plumley, ABB Instrumentation.

The water industry has the potential to have a great impact on the environment. It supplies around 15 billion litres of water and disposes of over 10 million tonnes of waste water every day in England and Wales. To do this, the industry has over 350,000 kilometres of sewers, 6,000 discharges from sewage treatment works and 25,000 intermittent discharges. So it’s hardly surprising that in 2003, water and sewerage companies were responsible for 198 of the most serious incidents of water pollution and 12.3% of the total number of pollution incidents in England and Wales, according to the Environment Agency.

Until now, the water industry has been largely regulated under the Water Resources Act, apart from certain sites which, for example, include new incinerators or other processes specifically bringing them under the Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) regulations. But the situation is about to change for some sites. Although smaller sites will continue to fall under the Water Resources Act, larger and more complex sites will soon be governed by PPC.