Posts

From Jar Testing to Real Savings: What Optimised PAM Delivers Following my recent pieces on cationic PAM for sludge dewatering, anionic PAM for industrial clarification, and the critical importance of proper jar testing, I want to bring this sequence to a practical resting point. Because while I’m a firm believer in understanding the science, I’m equally aware that the science only matters if it translates into something people can measure, justify, and act on. ...

UK Quarry Case Study: Turning Consent Failure Into Compliance Following my recent series on cationic PAM, anionic PAM for industrial clarification, the fundamentals of jar testing, and the real savings that optimised programmes can deliver, I want to do something slightly different in this piece. Rather than drawing patterns across multiple sites, I want to walk through a single engagement in full — from the initial call-out through to measured outcomes and the lessons that carry beyond that particular quarry gate. ...

Anionic PAM: The Unsung Hero of Industrial Wastewater Treatment Following my recent pieces on the homepage and on cationic PAM for sludge dewatering, I want to turn attention somewhere it’s arguably been deserved for even longer — onto anionic polyacrylamide, and the remarkable work it does in industrial wastewater treatment contexts that rarely make the headlines but matter enormously for the health of our rivers, estuaries, and coastlines. I’ll begin, as I often do, with a memory from Portsmouth. ...

Why Jar Testing Is the Foundation of Effective PAM Treatment Following my recent pieces on cationic PAM for sludge dewatering and anionic PAM for industrial clarification, I’ve received a number of messages from people working in water treatment asking essentially the same question: why does polyacrylamide perform brilliantly on some sites and persistently disappoint on others, even when the effluent challenges seem broadly comparable? It’s a question I’ve spent a significant part of my consultancy career answering. And the answer, more often than not, comes back to one single neglected step: the jar test. ...

Cationic PAM and Sludge Dewatering: Hard Lessons from the Field Building on my recent reflection about moving from the campaign trail to technical solutions — the piece I wrote for this site’s homepage, From Portsmouth South to Cleaner Water: Why Polyacrylamide Works — I want to get into something more specific today. Because while I believe in painting the broad picture, the real work happens in the details. And in wastewater treatment, few details matter more than what happens when sludge meets polymer inside a dewatering system. ...