Synergistic Environmental Solutions has a depth of experience troubleshooting impacts to biological treatment processes and effluents.  This experience allows the application of a variety tools and strategies that can be used to identify root causes and remedies, starting with simple reviews of your operations and process data.  In fact, your BOD results and other conventional data can provide a great deal of information about both laboratory and treatment processes.   If needed advanced process troubleshooting tools such as respirometry and formal toxic identification techniques can be applied.   

If you are not sure that your BOD results are representative of your operations, we can help.  We treat BOD as a simple bio-assay, and with the detailed worksheets from your laboratory, we can work to help you better understand and improve the quality of collected data.   

Our application of respirometry is based on years of hands on laboratory experience, which has leads to efficient application of this invaluable technology.  Respirometry has varied applications, including determination of treatability, critical feed concentrations,  toxic and inhibitory impacts, as well as macro & micro nutrient shortfalls. 

The links to the paper and presentation on this page provide an example of the application of respirometry to determine the site specific treatment performance of an industrial activated sludge WWTP.   The use of this information in EPA's Water9 model significantly reduced the reported air emissions for styrene monomer by orders of magnitude.  

The requirement for effluent toxicity testing is increasingly common in wastewater discharge permits.  Synergistic Environmental Solutions is experienced in evaluating the results of whole effluent  toxicity testing and will work with your laboratory to improve the quality and relevance of the results.

Toxic and inhibitory Impacts to your processes and effluents may have simple or complex root causes.  Synergistic Environmental Solutions can assist you in developing and implementing strategies to manage or eliminate toxicity and inhibition.