Auditing the quality of effluent discharges

✍ Scribed by A. E. Warn

• Book ID: 104754165
• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 864 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-6369
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00394228

✦ Synopsis

The public and their elected representatives want to see whether they get Value-for-Money from investment in preventing pollution.

For many rivers, the achievement of good water quality is a matter of regulating the discharges from wastewater treatment plants. The effective audit of the quality of such discharges is a good basis for measuring progress in controlling pollution.

To prove that control is effective, the techniques which underpin the following tasks must be sound and consistent:

-the standards for rivers must be devised so that the environmental objectives are met with the required reliability; the form of the standards will be constrained by the procedures available to monitor compliance;

-the standards worked out for effluents must have the correct mathematical relation with the river targets, and they too must be consistent with the options available for auditing performance; -the assessment of compliance must be objective; and, -statistics used to summarise the performance of a region (or a Nation) must be simple, stable, clear, and consistent with the results for individual sites.