Profile

😀 I live in a little village in Yorkshire, which is pretty, but the birds make a racket on a morning 🐥🐦. I don’t have any pets at the moment, but used to have a cat. I like watching hockey, and sometimes go with my work team to watch games at FlyDSA – although it can be a bit too violent for me sometimes. When I was really little I wanted to be an astronaut, as I liked looking at the stars with my Dad ⭐.

At my lab we test samples that have come out of wastewater treatment works, as well as soil from farmland. There are limits for some chemicals set by the government for these samples, so we check whether they are above these limits.

When you flush the toilet, the ‘waste’ goes down into the sewer and eventually gets to a treatment work. We test the liquid waste while it is being treated (we call these crude samples), and at the end when they go into the river (final samples). The solid contents of the waste are called sludge and are also treated and turned into something less hazardous and more useful – we test this too (it smells).

The samples need preparing before they can be tested, this can be quite a lot of work such as: grinding soil samples, weighing the solid samples, heating samples with acid, shaking soils with a chemical, filtering out the solid content.

Then the soils and water samples can be tested, such as for pH using a probe, solid content by filtering the sample through a filter paper, different colour reactions which tell you things like how much phosphorous, sulphide or ammonia, metals analysis using big expensive instruments, and lots of other tests.