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 di scharged from wastewater-treatment plants. Conventional treatment such as B OD removal has been achieved successfully for many years, but the requireme nts for toxicity removal are more onerous. The Amtox system, which was desi gned to give operators of wastewater-treatment plants a tool for assessing the toxicity/treatability, uses an immobilized culture of nitrifying bacter ia, maintained in a heated aerobic reactor, to determine whether or not a w aste is degradable. The system has a broad range of applications from treat ability tests to process monitoring and toxicity tracing and, by changing t he culture, effluent toxicity monitoring. This paper details two case studies: (i) in an abattoir where an Amtox moni tor was used to diagnose the source of toxicity, and (ii) on the River Tren t.