Expert Witness / Peer Review
Services
Peer Review
Been presented with results that just don’t make sense? Think some of the assumptions made are overly conservative? Looking for a second pair of eyes to review your results? Rubidium Environmental offers environmental consulting that can help you mitigate costs and risks by reviewing your existing reports. Don’t commit to costly environmental control solutions until you are sure they are right for your facility.
It’s not uncommon to see conservative estimates used in the preparation of Environmental Compliance Approval (ECA) applications. When reviewing Emissions Summary and Dispersion Model (ESDM) reports or Acoustic Assessment Reports (AAR), we first look at a few key areas:
- Does the data make sense?
- Flow rates/velocities/temperatures characteristic for that type of equipment
- Sound power levels within typical range for that applicable source
- How was the estimate made?
- Using source testing
- Is it consistent with other facilities (locally or in other jurisdictions)
- Using emission factors:
- Is it representative of your facility and operations?
- One of the challenges is finding the best and most relevant information that accurately reflect the nature of your facility’s operations
- What source was used? Is it reliable, and more importantly is it recent?
- You’d be surprised how often we see an emission factor for a piece of equipment based on a single set of tests performed over 30 years ago.
- Is it representative of your facility and operations?
- Using supplier data
- Is the information based off of a supplier guarantee or a cut sheet?
- Quite often this is general or highly conservative as it relates to contractual obligations, and not actual emissions
- We have a strong working relationship with many chemical suppliers and can work with them to get the most accurate data for your facility
- Based off of Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS)?
- Compositions given on MSDS’s are provided for safety purposes and are usually nowhere near actual compositions. In some cases, they are inflated by more than 100 times.
- We run into this issue the most for the composition of steels and other metals in general. In most cases, mill certificates are available, which give the actual elemental analysis. If not available, then various metals association publish values for appropriate ranges in composition for different alloys.
- Compositions given on MSDS’s are provided for safety purposes and are usually nowhere near actual compositions. In some cases, they are inflated by more than 100 times.
- Is the information based off of a supplier guarantee or a cut sheet?
- Using source testing
Expert Witness
Providing services to our clients and/or their lawyers, our experts have experience supporting air, odour, and noise disputes. We specialize in environmental consulting and providing our clients with accurate information and data that can be used when challenges arise.
To find out more about our Environmental Consulting, Peer Review & Expert Witness services, please contact us by filling out the form on this page or call us at (905) 635-4063.