Britannia Refined Metals

 

 

 

Britannia Refined Metals Ltd (BRM) is the world's largest primary refiner of lead.  It produces over 230,000 tonnes of refined primary lead and in excess of 450 tonnes of silver per annum. It also produces 36,000 tonnes of secondary lead from the recycling of lead acid batteries. The toxic nature of this heavy metal dictate that the quantity of lead entering the environment from the refining process should be minimised and kept below the tight statutory consent limits imposed by the Environment Agency. BRM therefore monitors a series of environmental parameters including the lead content of stack emissions, boundary lead-in-air levels and discharges to water. Its self-imposed limits are well below statutory levels.

 

Monitor-Pro has worked closely with BRM, as both providers of software, and as external consultants- helping them to make best use of their existing Monitor-Pro system.

 

"Before Monitor-Pro software was installed, the environmental department employed Excel spreadsheets to manage the monitored data," says Frank Boyes, senior environmental officer, BRM. "We found this process was time consuming and predicting trends was especially difficult with data based on spreadsheets - it could take up to a whole day to process the data.

 

"With Monitor-Pro we processed about 18 months' monitoring data in a couple of minutes and could assess any trends at the touch of a button. Trend analysis allowed us to identify a problem with the effluent plant's filtration system and appropriate measures were taken to prevent the need to retreat effluent." As well as handling monitored data from effluent to sewer and controlled waters, Monitor-Pro is now regularly used to monitor stack emissions (lead particulates), the lead content of air at the site's boundary as well

Data cleaning

We first looked at the existing data that had been entered for a number of years, and applied statistical methods to isolate rogue data points.

Setting of appropriate trigger levels

We then set more meaningful filters to help prevent these from entering the system in future, and set both legal and internal trigger levels.

Reports

With a clean system, some compliance reports were set up to automatically display any compliance issues on

charts, with information for both the past 3 months and 3 years.

Adjusted maps

Site Maps had their resolution corrected, and sample point locations put in

Training 

All users were then trained on how to get the best out of their system.

Automated data entry

An important issue arising from training was that the data had been entered manually, so they were trained on

automatic data entry using the importer, and new templates were set up.