Industry by night

This is the other end of our effluent system, just before the dirty water leaves the site to the sewers. You can see the settling pits in the foreground (which allow us to skim off any oils/foams and collect any solids) and the pipes carrying the various effluent streams running in the background.

Comment and criticism welcome on whether you think I should have cropped out the big floodlights, I couldn't decide (as I'd be left with a stub of a pole going skywards if I did).

The credit crunch is having a strange side-effect at work. We use a solvent called acetonitrile in a lot of our analytical work. The chemical is a side product of acrylonitrile production (which is a polymer used in the manufacture of things such as car dashboards and other fittings). As the demand for new cars has shrunk rapidly, so has the corresponding production of acrylonitrile. We now cannot get acetonitrile for love nor money and are having to rapidly re-formulate our test methods to cope. Oh and price has gone up from ~£9 to over £100 for 2.5 litres as and when any supplier is able to hand any down the chain...