New Products available for treatment of fats, oils and greases found in grease traps, sewer lines and waste water treatment plants. Laboratory efficacy testing and field testing is now complete and products are available for purchase.
All New Leaf Biologics hydrocarbon remediation products contain a specially formulated blend of bacteria native to Canada. Bacteria are selected for their ability to remediate sites contaminated with petroleum hydrocarbons and are non-toxic, non-pathogenic and environmentally friendly. Our products are designed to create a strong degradation environment which can remediate a wide variety of petroleum hydrocarbons under a wide range of environmental conditions.
In-Situ Remediation
In-situ remediation is an important technique used in the restoration of buildings and properties contaminated by fuel oil spills causing hydrocarbon pollution of soil and ground water.
With this technique, highly concentrated blends of bacteria, such as NLB-1035, are sprayed and injected into contaminated soil and ground water to allow for degradation of polluting hydrocarbons.
This on-site remediation technique is often preferred to excavation of contaminated soil followed by offsite treatment.
Our products have successfully been used in the soil remediation field in Ontario for the past three years. During this time our products have out competed similar competitor products by accomplishing successful remediation of hydrocarbon contaminated sites in a shorter amount of time. Our products have also been found to be highly efficient in building and property restoration of sites contaminated by fuel oil spills.
The Future
Customized Hydrocarbon Remediation Products: New Leaf is currently working on developing customized hydrocarbon remediation products. Current procedures in bioremediation of petroleum hydrocarbon contaminated environments utilize cocktails of microorganisms found to degrade hydrocarbons.
Often the same cocktail is used to remediate all different kinds of petroleum hydrocarbons in all different kinds of environments. The composition of different petroleum products can vary greatly, depending on the product and how the petroleum was formed.
Different organisms are capable of breaking down specific hydrocarbon components but most likely no organism is capable of breaking down all the hydrocarbon molecules that could be present. Also these hydrocarbon degrading microbes are most efficient in their natural habitat and may not grow well in environments with different conditions.
Based on how these variables can impact the efficacy of bioremediation we propose that the future of bioremediation is in customized microbial cocktails. Each individual spill or contamination must be treated separately with a customized cocktail of microbes chosen based on the oil composition and location of the spill or contamination.
In this scenario we would be using microbes that are actually able to degrade the specific hydrocarbons present. For example the type of microbes needed to remediate a spill of heavy crude oil is very different from the microbes needed to treat gasoline contaminated soil from a former gas station. The composition of the heavy crude oil differs from the highly refined gasoline.