A narrow range, sized properly, sold with the limits stated.

Why this company exists

Bioaugmentation has a credibility problem it earned honestly. Enough products have been oversold over the last thirty years that a meaningful share of experienced plant operators regard the entire category as snake oil. Read the trade press and you will find percentage reductions quoted to two decimal places from instruments that cannot support that precision, case studies with no baseline, and claims that sludge can be eliminated when a substantial part of it is sand.

We do not think the answer to that is better marketing. It is a narrower offer, stated more precisely, with the failure conditions published rather than buried. The operators who have been burned before are exactly the ones who become long-term customers if you are the first supplier who tells them their lagoon is a poor candidate.

What we actually sell

Four dry formats lead the range. Two sinking solids for accumulated organic bottom sludge, and two dry water-soluble pouches for maintenance dosing and general organic load — one of them a cold-weather blend for water too cold for the standard one. All are built on Bacillus spore-formers, which produce the proteases, lipases, amylases and cellulases that hydrolyse organic solids. These four are dry, because Bacillus sporulates and survives drying essentially intact, so a dry format costs nothing biologically for this particular job — and only a solid carries organisms down onto a settled blanket. Dry is where our formulation work is concentrated, and it is what we are best at.

A liquid line is supplied alongside it. Some systems are dosed by metered liquid and some loads are carried in the water rather than settled on the bottom, and for those a liquid is the right vehicle rather than a lesser one. It is built to our own specification and benchmarked in the same tests as the dry range. What we will not do is quote a liquid for a bottom blanket a solid should be treating.

We do not run the fermenter. The blend is contract-manufactured to our own specification — the strains, their ratios, the carrier and the enzyme package chosen for benthic organic solids — and sold under our label. That distinction is worth saying plainly, because most of this industry buys a stock blend from a similar handful of fermenters without mentioning it. What we add is the formulation itself, the testing behind it, and candour about the limits.

What we are not

We do not perform on-site sludge surveys. Several pages here explain how lagoon sludge is measured and what makes one measurement comparable with the next, and that is educational material rather than an offer to come and survey your lagoon. We can test a sludge sample you send us — a laboratory characterisation of how much of the accumulation is treatable — and if you already hold survey figures they improve the sizing considerably and we will use them.

What we do have is a field record for the products themselves: results measured at operating plants treating with these formulations, collected on the case studies page. Each is labelled a field result rather than a controlled trial, because that is what it is, and each carries a mark for what was never measured alongside it — no untreated control, no stated method, no named location. The whole distribution is published, including the results that sit outside the range we tell operators to plan for. Publishing only the flattering end of it is one of the things that got this category its reputation.

How we talk about results

Three rules, applied to everything on this website and in every quotation.

Every figure carries its provenance. A result measured at a plant during treatment is labelled a field result, including every one of our own. A competitor’s brochure figure is labelled vendor-published. A controlled study says so. If no independent figure exists — which is true more often than this industry admits — we say that rather than borrowing somebody else’s.

We report mass as well as depth. Nearly every published result in this category is a depth reduction, but dredging is billed per dry ton. Those two quantities do not move at the same rate, and reporting only the one that moves furthest would flatter us.

We state the limitation before the benefit. Bioaugmentation digests the volatile organic fraction. Sand, grit, silt, mineral precipitates and plastics remain at any dose. That sentence costs us orders, and it is the reason the ones we do take tend to work.