Who Needs all that “QA Stuff” for Laboratories Supporting NPDES Permits?

As part of a recent wastewater-compliance program initiative, Environmental Standards was retained by a large food and beverage processor to gather information to help address issues with its contracted National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) laboratories and to help critically investigate periodic, but ongoing, discharge Notices of Violation (NOVs) being issued to its facilities. This initiative was advanced as a proactive program to evaluate its wastewater-compliance program across its North American operations.

The goals of the initiative were to gain an understanding of the requirements of the wastewater programs at each of its facilities, but also to drive consistency and improve the quality of results reported from its retained contract laboratories. By gathering program information and then creating consistent procedures for wastewater sampling, analysis, and reporting, Environmental Standards was able to support the client to meet the objectives of installing a quality “backbone” wastewater-compliance program. As an intentional program benefit, through the use of a program Chemistry/Technical Support Help Desk, Environmental Standards successfully challenged and reversed several (to date) wastewater NOVs at various processing facilities.

Since 1987, Environmental Standards’ Consulting Chemists have been supporting NPDES permit holders by being an on-call resource, enhancing and standardizing their sampling, analytical and reporting programs . For more information on our NPDES support programs , please contact Alyssa Reed at areed@envstd.com or Rock Vitale at rvitale@envstd.com.