WEP has a new, state-of-the-art environmental laboratory at 7120 Henry Clay Boulevard, Liverpool, NY.

Twenty-one staff members, including four chemists and a microbiologist, man the lab. Our highly trained professional and technical staff has an average of 19 years’ experience.

In addition, the new facility also houses fifteen field personnel. These highly trained technicians are responsible for all aspects of sample collection and transportation. Both elements working closely together provides Water Environment Protection with a comprehensive analytical and sampling regimen.

The lab handles 20,000 samples and performs over 100,000 analyses each year. Samples are collected and tested at the lab every day, 365 days of the year. Some of the substances and parameters that the environmental laboratory is certified to analyze are:

• Nonpotable water and potable water bacteriology. This includes bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) and other pathogens.
• Environmental water and wastewater
• Soils and sediments
• Nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. It is the goal of treatment at Metro, for example, to limit drastically the nutrients discharged to Onondaga Lake.
• Trace metals, such as copper, nickel, lead, and mercury. Information on the concentration of these chemicals is important to continue WEP's pollution prevention program.
• Other substances such as oil and grease because they can disrupt the treatment process.

WEP's Environmental Lab supports state-of-the-art equipment, including:

Inductively coupled plasma (ICP) for trace metal analyses (cadmium, copper, chromium, silver, nickel, zinc, lead, iron, manganese, molybdenum, and barium)

Atomic absorption spectrophotometer (AAS), both flame and graphite furnace (sodium, calcium, potassium, magnesium, arsenic, selenium)

Flow injection mercury system (FIMS) (mercury)

Flow injection analyses (FIA) for various analytical species (Kjeldahl nitrogen, ammonia, cyanide, nitrate, nitrite, phosphorus and its various forms, chloride)

Total organic carbon analyzer (TOC) (organic nitrogen, inorganic nitrogen)

Nephelometer for turbidity

Spectrophotometer (soluble reactive phosphorus, sulfate, hexavalent chromium).

The WEP Environmental Lab also analyzes for the following parameters: