March 1999

Thank You For Supporting Our New Website with 1035 visits in February!

We are very grateful that our clients and distributors have found our website so interesting and useful. We are finally starting to get listings on the search engines, so we look forward to welcoming new visitors.

Potential New Distributors

New companies may soon join the ranks of our enthusiastic and knowledgeable distributors, extending our range of client assistance in waste, water, odor and fuel treatment. We do feel that clients are better served by a distributor who can make on-site visits, assist with survey questions, perform feasibility bench-scale tests to determine the most suitable products, etc. A distributor can also obtain better freight rates when bulk purchases are made consolidating the orders of a number of small clients and can sometimes offer better pricing, again based upon the size of the total order. Container shipments are also far less likely to be damaged or rerouted during shipment. Nonetheless, we do make direct sales to clients in states and countries without an official distributor. So, please do not feel left out. We want to clean-up the world! (No, your editor is not related to Bill Gates, although we are BOTH Scorpios.)

You Found Us!! Welcome Back

We are very pleased to regain contact with clients who formerly purchased from distributors who no longer work with us. Those of you who have not purchased since 1995 will find that the concentrations of our bacterial products have increased, our range of solutions has improved and our quality control and security have tightened. For fuel treatments, we offer a broader range of available information, in updated formats. All of our Material Safety Data Sheets, for all product lines, were updated in 1998. For payment, we accept charge cards and bank-to-bank wire transfers.

Your Editor Has Been Examining Sales Patterns and...

So what else do you DO when you are snowed in? Although Alken-Murray's finally tally indicates that microbial remediation products represent 60% of our total sales for the year, during the first three months of the year, fuel treatments take a 69% lead, with chemical water treatment taking second place with 22% and microbes receiving only 9%. Perhaps our refusal to ship liquid microbial products when freezing temperatures threaten product viability offers a partial explanation for this phenomenon, but the dry remediation products handle cold weather without a problem, so feel free to order them anytime you like.

Print, Don't Try to Download Unless You Have An HTML Reader

The various forms posted on this website can be copied by clicking on the "print" button of your browser. We have not set them up for download. If you want to copy an article, select a block of text, use the "Control C" command, then move to the document you wish to insert the text into in your word processor, and use the "Control V" command, to insert it. If you have trouble with this explanation, call Ken at 540-636-1236 and he will assist you.

Cornell Discovers Bug That Degrades Chlorine, PCE & TCE

An article in Waste and Water Treatment magazine, October 1998 (page 44) describes a new bacterium, known as Coccoid strain 195, which dechlorinates anaerobically by halorespiration, leaving behind ethylene. The only drawback this editor sees to widely dispersing this organism is that it has a tough cell wall that makes it totally resistant to common antibiotics. No matter how beneficial its other characteristics, Alken-Murray will never work with a bacterium that is not susceptible to at least one commonly available antibiotic, just in case the strain should pass this characteristic to a more pathogenic strain, when it is released to the wild, leading to an uncontrollable disease outbreak. The widespread presence of a dechlorinating bacterium could also lessen the effectiveness of chlorination treatment of waste water, and this could also prove deleterious.

EdieWeb - Environmental Website and Search Engine from England

Aside from the fact that this website offers only articles and suppliers from England, it is a handy tool. to join for free and take advantage of its research library, where I found the article summarized above.

10% Discount - March-ONLY - Alken Clear-Flo® 1001, 7001 and 7018

Its cold, we are buried in snow and your editor is bored. Let's see what I can do to stir up some reactions. How about a sale? What kind of bacteria would you want at this time of year? I know, cold weather microbes! CF 1001 for aquatic applications, CF 7001 for municipal applications, and CF 7018 for industrial applications.

What are Biosafety Classifications?

Biosafety class 1 is the designation for well-characterized agents not known to cause disease in healthy adult humans, and of minimal potential hazard to laboratory personnel and the environment. Special containment equipment or facility design is not required nor generally used. Strains used in Alken Clear-Flo, Enz-Odor and Treat-A-Loo are all classified in Biosafety class 1.

Biosafety class 2 is the designation for agents of moderate potential hazard to personnel and the environment. Examples are: hepatitis, mumps, measles, influenza, diphtheria, and AIDS. It differs in that (1) laboratory personnel must have specific training in handling pathogenic agents and are directed by competent scientists, (2) access to the laboratory must be limited when work is being conducted, (3) extreme precautions must be taken with contaminated sharp items, and (4) certain procedures in which infectious aerosols or splashes may be created must be conducted in biological safety cabinets or other physical containment equipment.

Biosafety level 3 is the designation for indigenous or exotic agents which may cause serious or potentially lethal disease as a result of exposure by the inhalation route. Examples include the "street virus" Rabies, and Yellow fever. Laboratory personnel must have specific training in handling pathogenic and potentially lethal agents, and must be supervised by competent scientists who are experienced in working with these agents. All procedures involving the manipulation of infectious materials must be conducted within biological safety cabinets or other physical containment devices, or by personnel wearing appropriate personal protective clothing and equipment. The laboratory must have special engineering and design features.

Biosafety class 4 is the designation for dangerous and exotic agents which pose a high individual risk of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infections and life-threatening disease. Members of the laboratory staff are required to have specific and thorough training in handling extremely hazardous infectious agents; and must understand the primary and secondary containment functions of the standard and special practices, the containment equipment, and the laboratory design characteristics. They must be supervised by competent scientists who are trained and experienced in working with these agents. Access to the laboratory must be strictly controlled by the laboratory director. The facility is either in a separate building or in a controlled area within a building, which is completely isolated from all other areas of the building. The Biosafety Level 4 laboratory must have special engineering and design features to prevent microorganisms from being disseminated into the environment.

Why Are These Definitions So Hard To Find?

While testing to see how easily an Alken-Murray client or distributor could locate a complete definition for each of these terms through the internet, your editor discovered that multiple combinations of terms had to be entered into several search engines to even get close to the Center for Disease Control website, where a lovely table with simple definitions and information on precautions for each level is completely buried! to find it.

Why Did That Fancy New Aerator Make Your Lagoon Smell WORSE?

There are aeration system marketing companies that promise you that all you have to do to fix odor in your lagoon is to purchase a large expensive aeration system, because aerobic bacteria do not create nasty odors. So, you harness your resources for a capital expenditure, figuring that you will recoup from the good relations your odor control plan will promote in your community. You install the system and you pull the switch. The motors rumble, the surface bubbles and gunk starts to rise from the bottom and...and...the stench is overpowering, much worse than it was before. You turn in horror to the aeration company installer, who tells you not to worry, just give it some time. Well, you have just spent a ton of money, so you agree to let it run for awhile, but it does not improve. Why?

When you start up a lagoon without aeration, depositing semi-liquid waste into it, it stratifies, with only the top layer receiving any air. The oxygen demand of the waste quickly robs the lower layers of any oxygen they contained at startup, so obligate anaerobes (bacteria that cannot function WITH air) are encouraged to proliferate, while the obligate aerobes (bacteria that cannot function WITHOUT air) rise to the surface or die off. The level of organic matter in the lagoon is much greater than the natural initial bacterial population in the lagoon can handle, so the cycle of breakdown is slowed while the proportion of strains changes and the new population struggles to catch up to the tremendous volume of waste.

Let's be honest here, you don't find 10,000 hogs naturally congregating together in a small area in nature. If such a population assembled in nature, it would quickly denude the land of nutrients and would die of starvation. So a natural lagoon was not designed to handle the volume of waste from an animal production facility and must work hard to adapt to it. Until the hydrogen sulfide volume, produced by obligate anaerobe Desulfovibrio desulfuricans, becomes so incredible over a period of time, maybe two to five years, that a large surface growth of purple sulfur bacteria is encouraged to develop from the small amounts of this strain arriving from the animal intestines, you will develop a relatively stinky, relatively stable lagoon, depending on the landscaping and prevailing winds.

When you add aeration, you kill off the predominant obligate anaerobic bacteria (like the aeration man said it would), leaving only a tiny population of bacteria capable of aerobic respiration (which the aeration man didn't count on). Digestion halts, the lagoon contents are stirred up, volatilizing the gases, so it smells much worse. Does this mean that Alken-Murray opposes aeration? The answer is "Absolutely not". If you apply the correct species of facultative anaerobes (bacteria that can function either with or without air), in sufficient quantity to seed the lagoon and gradually introduce higher levels of aeration, you can competitively exclude the undesirable strains, while you encourage a faster, less odorous, and more complete digestion of waste. Although aeration for a large lagoon is expensive to install and to run,, if you have already installed the system, Alken-Murray can make it work.

An alternative approach, that we endorse, is a two cell or double lagoon system, in which the bulk of the nutrients are degraded anaerobically, by the correct suite of facultative anaerobes, to reduce odor and liquefy the waste. The effluent from the primary lagoon is sent to a smaller, aerated lagoon for nitrification and final waste degrading. This system is the best management practice, in our opinion. We will be glad to share our system design and Alken-Murray prescription, with a complete explanation of how and why it works. Just e-mail or phone us with your request for Bio-Info 2.

Alken® 860 Can Assist with Refinery Demulsification Too

Alken® 860 is designed for demulsification in many situations besides salvaging oil from bunker slops. Albert Waltien, long-time Alken-Murray technical staffer and present-day consultant, tells us that this product at one time, was sold under another number and was used exclusively to improve the performance of crude oil desalination and demulsification equipment. We see no reason to revive the old number, but we do think our distributors and clients should be aware of this product's alternate applications.

How About a March-ONLY 5% discount on Alken PDE 903?

What better time to offer a discount on our diesel cold-flow improver? We will even offer an extra 5% to the first person to show up with a snow-plow to dig us out so we can prepare your order! (Just kidding)