Water Quality: EPA to Modify Chemical Limits for Perchlorate and Chromium 6 in Drinking Water

On Wednesday, February 2, 2011, the Obama administration outlined a more aggressive approach to curbing levels of certain chemicals in drinking water, saying it will develop a legal nationwide maximum for one chemical and signaling a separate effort to set new limits for other substances.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced that they would be moving from an advisory guideline to a mandatory limit for perchlorate, a chemical often associated with rocket fuel. The EPA also will be advancing a separate effort to set new limits for 16 other chemicals in drinking water. The Agency is particularly concerned about the substance known as chromium 6, or hexavalent chromium.

More recently, laboratory tests commissioned by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found chromium 6 in tap water from 31 of 35 U.S. cities, with the highest levels in Norman, Okla.; Honolulu; and Riverside, Calif.

The EPA move to set its first-ever perchlorate standard comes after years of bureaucratic struggle with the Defense Department. A 2010 Government Accountability Office report found that 53 Defense Department installations had perchlorate at levels above a current advised limit of 15 parts per billion.

The Defense Department has already taken action beyond initial sampling at 48 of the 53 facilities, including some steps to remediate any contamination.

A group that includes defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. and perchlorate maker American Pacific Corp. challenged the EPA in a press release later Wednesday, saying that so far, no research has shown an adverse effect in humans exposed to perchlorate. The group, calling itself the Perchlorate Information Bureau, also said that perchlorate hadn’t shown up in public drinking water at levels that represent a public-health risk.

The problem could be present at more Defense Department sites than currently are being monitored, if the EPA decides that an even tougher standard is warranted. The NRDC says that a level of one part per billion is appropriate, compared with the EPA’s current advisory level of 15 parts per billion. Regulators have been studying perchlorate for more than a decade. California first required public water systems to monitor for the chemical in 1999.

 

Locus Introduces Augmented Reality to Integrated Portal for Environmental, Energy, Water, Resource, and Emissions Management

Locus Expands ePortal to Address a Growing Need for Environmental Enterprise Resource Planning (EERP)

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 6 December 2010  — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental compliance and information management software, announced today new and expanded features and functionalities of ePortal, its award winning software platform for environmental and energy information management. This fifth generation version of the platform introduces a new Rich Internet Application (RIA)-based user interface that provides enhanced usability, improved work flows, and Augmented Reality (AR).

ePortal now provides customers with a single integrated portal platform to capture, organize, visualize, and report all key facility environmental information in a central, enterprise database offered in the cloud. The platform enables simplified work flows and advanced visualization that includes AR to create individualized views of information across media and resources. With the use of the ePortal software clients can manage all aspects of their regulatory compliance, energy and water usage, water quality, air emissions, GHG reporting, health and safety and much more. In short, ePortal provides the most advanced approach to the complex EERP challenges that face many companies today.

Locus’ ePortal is built around the familiar Conceptual Site Model (CSM). By design, CSM is multidisciplinary and encompasses both legacy and ongoing information about a site or facility. It can be viewed as a cube drawn around a site, part of which is underground and part above ground. All relevant inputs to and outputs from the cube are monitored and recorded. On the input side, utilities such as electricity, gas, and water, and raw materials are tracked. Outputs include air, water, and soil discharges and waste. Equipment within the cube such as boilers, stacks, tanks, and so forth become assets that have various attributes that must be recorded, stored, and often reported on.

For companies that adopt ePortal, it becomes the enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard for managing the many aspects of the sustainable enterprise. It synthesizes and crystallizes what is already known about a site or facility and augments that information with ongoing monitoring and reporting. Companies are able to report and forecast the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in real time across multiple hierarchical views. ePortal brings Augmented Reality to CSM.

Using Locus’ CSM-based approach, clients can take a more holistic view of their enterprise, enabling them to reduce both their compliance expenditures and their operational costs. In particular, ePortal provides enterprise tools to reduce and optimize consumption of various resources to lower GHG emissions and encourage more sustainable growth. Simplification of facility management based on a CSM approach recognizes that businesses need a flexible, easy to understand, multi-media solution in today’s multi-regulatory world. Locus’ CSM-based environmental portal provides the tools to quantify environmental liabilities, manage sustainability and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, report water footprint, organize compliance and Health and Safety (H&S) records, accurately report to regulators, and run what-if analysis to facilitate forecasting.

“The increased sophistication of the corporate customer, combined with the recent challenging economic climate has fueled the need for easy to use integrated solutions that allow fewer people to manage more using less. That was the driving force behind ePortal’s recent update, which provides a single software solution, across the various regulated media. Historically, many companies have built silo applications that deal with one or a few reporting requirements and associated data management needs. In fact, some companies have been building software solutions in this space for over a decade. But what has been lacking in the market space is an integrated solution that brings many if not all environmental, energy, water and other compliance and consumption requirements under a single portal infrastructure and Single Sign On (SSO) on the web. What industry wants and needs is an integrated system similar to ERP that would manage all their environmental, energy, water, and other sustainability needs. That is exactly what we have built and are happy to offer it to our clients,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.

Locus presents at GRA Meeting: Thinking Outside the Pipe Exploring & Protecting Local Water Supplies

This two-day conference provided the latest scientific, management, legal and policy information regarding sustainable use of our local water resources in urban regions.

ZDNet | Water, logged: Software now calculates water footprint

One of the developers in the environmental compliance management software space, Locus Technologies, has added the ability to track water footprint-related information.

Read full article here.

Water Footprint

Locus cloud-based software offers the solution for the complex problem of footprinting water quality

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., May 24, 2010 — In response to international recognition of the need for industry to increase its water reporting efforts, Locus Technologies (Locus), leader in cloud-based environmental compliance and information management software, has expanded its award winning Environmental Information Management (EIM) software to include water quality footprinting capabilities for businesses.

EIM’s expanded functionality enables companies to manage and organize their water quality data on a larger and more comprehensive scale using cloud-based computing and storage, thus avoiding the need to buy additional environmental software or store the same data in more than one location. And, Locus’ innovative enterprise software model employs mashups — applications that integrate data or functionality from multiple sources or technologies — offering the potential to completely upend the way a corporation manages its water data.

There is little dispute in both scientific and business communities that water shortages represent a worldwide challenge no less important than climate change. Water is a finite resource, growing in scarcity as the world’s population explodes. The worldwide water shortage is acute — less than three percent of the world’s water supply is drinking water. In addition, there is one notable difference between water and air emissions. Any emission of unwanted gases into the air can be almost instantly remediated by cutting off the source. However, any gases that have escaped cannot be recaptured to be remediated. In contrast, water that is contaminated frequently can be treated, but the process is generally lengthy, costly, and energy-intensive. Once contaminated, water needs to be monitored until cleaned. Water is vital and its value varies according to locality, use, and conditions.

Over the last 15 years, Locus has focused on water quality and related issues. The company has a world-class team of experts with deep domain knowledge in this field. Locus’ flagship application EIM is successfully deployed at thousands of sites worldwide and contains organized water quality information at millions of locations. Existing regulations require monitoring and reporting of both groundwater and surface water contamination from various industrial processes, spills, and other releases. Until recently, such voluminous data was kept mainly to comply with regulatory reporting requirements regarding effluents and contamination.

However, governments and other voluntary reporting organizations such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the non-profit Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) are shifting their focus from compliance-based monitoring and reporting of effluents to reporting on the scarcity and quality of drinking water supplies, in effect monitoring the “water footprint” required of industry, agriculture, and manufacturing. The water accounting is the next big challenge for business.

CDP late last year launched its Water Disclosure initiative, seeking to increase reporting on water-related risks and opportunities, especially by companies operating in water-intensive sectors. CDP Water Disclosure will provide critical water-related data from the world’s largest corporations to inform the global market place on investment risk and commercial opportunity.

The total volume of freshwater used by a business defines its water quantity footprint. Water quantity footprints are measured in terms of volume of water consumed and/or contaminated per unit of time and are relatively easy to calculate. Such is not the case for water quality footprints, which require analyzing water samples for a potentially endless number of chemical parameters that define water quality in accordance with various regulatory standards such as the Clean Water Act. The amount and quantity of data generated in this process is staggering and unmanageable without sophisticated software tools, such as EIM provides.

“Water management issues represent a potentially huge area of risk for business. Reducing one’s water footprint should be part of the environmental strategy of a business, just like reducing one’s carbon footprint or energy usage already is. Our customers have traditionally focused on meeting emission standards associated with releases to water, air, and soil,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.

“Meeting emission standards for compliance purposes is one thing, but looking at how effluents’ management actually results in lower risk, reduced energy consumption, improved operational efficiency, and ultimately an improved bottom line is another thing. Leaders who create water quality transparency for their companies before others do, and who formulate specific and measurable targets with respect to water footprint reduction, can turn this into a competitive advantage and Locus software can help them do that,” continued Duplan.

EPA Calls for Stricter Drinking-Water Standards

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is planning to tighten standards for four water contaminants that can cause cancer as part of a new strategy to toughen drinking-water regulation.

EPA said it will start rulemakings to revise standards for two contaminants used in industrial or textile processing, tetracholorethylene and trichloroethylene, within the year. The EPA will follow that rulemaking by setting stricter standards for epichlorohydrin and acrylamide, which can contaminate drinking water through the water-treatment process.
Speaking at a conference of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said her agency is now developing a broad new set of strategies to strengthen public health protection from contaminants in drinking water.

“To confront emerging health threats, strained budgets and increased needs—today’s and tomorrow’s drinking water challenges—we must use the law more effectively and promote new technologies,” she said.

Ms. Jackson said the agency would now address contaminants as a group rather than individually, saying the current process is too time-consuming and fails to take advantage of cost-effective programs and technology. She said the EPA would also help to foster new technologies, use existing laws more stringently and partner with states to share data from public-water systems.

The agency is also assessing 14 other contaminants, including law and copper, chromium, fluoride, arsenic, atrazine and perchlorate.

Congress to investigate hydraulic fracturing for concerns about potential drinking-water contamination

WSJ reported today that concerns about potential drinking-water contamination are prompting Congress to investigate hydraulic fracturing, a controversial drilling technique that has helped boost U.S. natural-gas production. Hydrofracturing has been used by the oil industry for decades but has become far more common in recent years as companies discovered large new gas fields  in the US. The resulting drilling boom helped U.S. gas production surge by about 20% since 2005, but sparked concerns that chemicals from the process could seep into drinking-water supplies.

“As we use this technology in more parts of the country on a much larger scale, we must ensure that we are not creating new environmental and public health problems,” Mr. Waxman, chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, said in a statement.

The industry beleives that hydrofracturing is safe and with proper tools like Locus EIM water quality management software can prove that hydrofracturing can be managed to protect groundwater resources. Now, more than ever, a proper water quality management tools are necessary to address skeptics and prove that hydraulic fracturing is not linked to large scale drinking water contamination.  It is almost certain that EPA will legislate this technology and require better monitoring and reporting.

ZDNet GreenTech Pastures | Locus adds water module to environment software application portfolio

Water management problems capture more attention from environmental technology player Locus.

Read full article here.

Locus Adds Cost Cutting Tool to EIM Software

New EIM tool, LTMO, helps customers reduce groundwater well monitoring

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., November 23, 2009 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental software, announced today the release of its Long Term Monitoring Optimization (LTMO) software that helps customers cut the cost of groundwater remediation projects. LTMO is built-in to EIM, Locus’ web-based application for managing sampling, analytical and geological data associated with environmental projects.

Long term monitoring of contaminated groundwater is one of the biggest costs of many environmental projects, often requiring that hundreds or more wells be sampled at regular intervals, with each sample event costing hundreds of dollars. Over time, changes in site conditions may mean the number of sampled wells or the frequency of sampling can be reduced. A number of analytical tools and approaches exist to identify redundant wells and pinpoint opportunities for sampling and monitoring reductions. MAROS (Monitoring And Remediation Optimization System) software application, developed by the Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment, is one of the most popular of these tools. With the LTMO tool, Locus has incorporated many of the techniques and methodologies of MAROS, including trend analyses and the Delaunay triangulation method.

The Locus EIM LTMO tool offers several distinct advantages over MAROS and other existing stand-alone or spreadsheet-based applications that perform similar analyses. First of all, there is no need to export data in a special format to another application. All analyses are performed under the umbrella of EIM. Secondly, robust integrated Web 2.0 graphical tools and reports provide a wealth of options for examining the results of the analyses, including extensive backup data that can be supplied to regulatory agencies as needed. Finally, the results of any analysis can be saved and easily pulled up for review or modification.

“We expect the incorporation of the LTMO tool into EIM to be extremely beneficial to our large enterprise customers that have thousands of groundwater sites. Instead of the analyses being performed on the desktops of their many consultants, long-term groundwater management data resides in a single, central, web-accessible database. LTMO is a very powerful tool that significantly reduces the cost of long term stewardship of groundwater contaminated sites,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.

“The recent $11 billion bill passed to fix California’s water infrastructure includes a provision for mandatory monitoring of the state’s groundwater, which is often used during times of drought and is most vulnerable to contamination. From the onset of the new bill, Locus’ LTMO tool will be there to help industry and government to optimize groundwater monitoring programs,” added Duplan.

Contact Locus today for a demonstration of this exciting new feature and see how Locus EIM can help you reduce your long-term sampling and analytical costs.