Discharge Licence
Paul Downing
You may need a discharge licence if you want to discharge trade or sewage effluent to surface water or ground.
The Environment Agency regulate all discharges to controlled waters. These can be surface water (river) or to ground (groundwater). The owness will be on you to prove that your effluent is not polluting a controlled watercourse.
Discharge Licence Types
The type of permit you require and the amount of supporting information you need to supply will depend on the effluent type. If you are discharging from a small domestic process, this therefore will be an easier application than from an industrial process.
We regularly help housebuilders with small effluent plant discharge consents. These are the simplest form of discharge licence. Industrial treatment plants can involve more complex river modelling and also more complicated sampling regimes.
The receiving watercourse or groundwater medium will also determine if your application is successful. No surface water discharge can be to a dry ditch. This is not a controlled watercourse. If you plan to discharge close to an abstraction point used for potable water supplies, then this will also be restricted.
In summary, how complex you application is, depends on the effluent type and where it is to be discharged. Call us today for more information.