Demonstrating Water Quality and Quality Education

The City of London's Greenway Pollution Control Centre (PCC) Laboratory is supporting the Environmental Technology program at Fanshawe College through the donation of three laboratory instruments used for wastewater testing.

With hands-on experience on equipment typically used in government and commercial laboratories for large scale water quality testing, students now have access to lab experiments which analyze water samples for a range of chemical contaminants.

The equipment includes a purge and trap apparatus, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer (GC/MS) system, and an autosampler, which uses a robotic arm to transfer sample vials to a syringe assembly.

Left to right: Karen Buchholz, faculty member in the School of Applied Science and Technology, discusses the capabilities of the new instrumentation with Grace Aye, Senior Lab Technologist at the Greenway Pollution Control Centre Laboratory.

Through the software that controls all three instruments, students can see how the systems are controlled and interact with each other. Students will be able to identify, determine the chemical structure, and calculate the concentrations of contaminants in samples, important tasks performed in a modern automated chemical testing laboratory.

As well as benefitting students in the Environmental program, the instruments can be used for food and biological samples by students in the Science Laboratory and Biotechnology programs.

Greenway Pollution Control Centre Laboratory representatives Tony Van Rossum and Grace Aye toured the Fanshawe lab on April 3, 2009. Participating in the visit were Fanshawe President Howard Rundle, members of the Faculty of Technology and the School of Applied Science and Technology including a former co-op student, and the Fanshawe College Foundation. The Greenway Lab has been a longtime supporter of Fanshawe students through co-op placement and employment opportunities.