What is the Environment Bill?

The Environment Bill is mainly dealing with storm overflows and their adverse effect on the environment, forcing water companies to collaborate on infrastructure plans and paving the way for the creation of new local organisations to regulate water levels where this is called for. All sensible measures to ensure the UK mitigates the risk of flash flooding from extreme weather events and cyclones, so tragically brought into focus in Germany in the summer of 2021.

There are some other aspects of the bill that are more relevant to us here at Arvia.

For a start, water abstraction will be more heavily regulated to avoid environmental damage in local areas and could lead to the revocation of some permanent extraction licences.

Second, the Environment Bill policy paper states:

“Water quality: we are providing powers to enable the Secretary of State to maintain the list of priority substances used to assess the chemical status of water bodies in line with the latest scientific and technical knowledge, now that previous powers to update it (section 2(2) European Communities Act 1972) have been revoked at the end of the transition period.”

Wastewater discharge regulations and how Arvia can help

DEFRA’s guidance for environmental discharge (Environmental Permitting Regulations 2010) is completely out of date and the guidance for this document was published in the summer of 2011. Ten years is a long time in a science like tertiary water treatment and at Arvia we also know that measurement techniques have improved considerably in that time. We’ve already drawn attention to the fact that in many countries (including the UK, it would appear) regulations have yet to catch up with the recent advances in water analysis.

Our water analysis machines allow us to run tests down to parts per trillion for many substances. And our Nyex Rosalox water treatment reactors can also remove many recalcitrant organics down to those sorts of levels – whilst only using a fraction of the power of competing systems.

Ten years ago we were lucky to get down to parts per million for some compounds. Now we can go a million times better than that – to parts per trillion!

The UK Government have accepted that current regulations for surface waters and groundwaters are not yielding the results they were hoping for now they’re testing with more advanced equipment but it remains to be seen what substances the regulations will cover and how stringent they will be.

Arvia – water treatment experts

For an in-depth conversation about how we could help your company in terms of water treatment why not set up a meeting or conference call?

Arvia are the water experts and understand that every manufacturing system is different and therefore every solution we propose will be unique to your organisations’ requirements.

It could be that we’ve already had experience in an industry similar to yours. So please call or email for an initial conversation with a water treatment expert.