The History of QROS
QROS was established in response to a need in the contaminated land and water industry
for a single supplier of accurate field techniques that could generate rapid and
reliable results, thus allowing confident decision making at a fraction of the time
taken for laboratory analysis to facilitate such decisions.
The QROS founder has been active in contaminated land analysis since 1991. He has
worked with companies developing and introducing into the UK and European markets
various immunoassay kits, PID instruments, Anodic Stripping Voltammetry instrumentation
for low level heavy metal analysis as well as other hydrocarbon field test kits.
He also worked with a leading contaminated land laboratory services provider. This
has given QROS a comprehensive insight into what work best as an analytical technique
for on-site analysis of contaminated land.
One of the most pertinent observations made by the QROS founder was that whilst most
contaminated land practitioners wanted to use on-site analytical techniques, they
were put off using them if they had to run the analysis themselves. Good quality
analysis from a reputable laboratory requires a team of staff that includes the technician
who operates the instrument, an analyst to interpret the data and another technician
who can maintain the analyser. The same requirements are needed when running an analyser
on site, but the role of the technicians and analyst must be combined into one person.
This level of expertise is unusual in one person and if a person is not sufficiently
well trained in the use of a technique, the results produced can be misleading. To
effectively use on-site analysis, techniques must be available to analyse for all
of the contaminants expected on the site. This means the on-site analyst must be
familiar with a wide variety of techniques and instruments, and have ready access
to them all. For most on-site practitioners, finding anyone with this level of expertise
was almost impossible as was the task of finding all of the techniques needed. One
final issue was the requirement for a readily available back up for the analyser
if the one on site stopped working for some reason (normally a breakage). On-site
analysers are expensive and needing to keep a replacement just in case is prohibitive
for many. For these reasons on-site analysis remained a fringe activity. QROS removes
these problems by providing a highly trained analyst plus all of the required analysers
for a particular project.
The second observation was that the majority of analytical devices and techniques
that are being used are adaptations of existing instruments or techniques often over
20 years old, and are not specifically designed for on-site analysis for contaminated
land. For this reason QROS has heavily invested in its own development programme
to design and build instruments and develop techniques specifically for on-site use.
The first of these products is the QED hydrocarbon analyser. This unique analyser
is able to easily identify the sample hydrocarbon type and accurately quantify the
amount of hydrocarbon present. QROS also works closely with other technology manufacturers
to help them produce products more readily tailored to contaminated land analysis.
For example, QROS is proud to work with Oxford Instruments, a world leading UK company
in the design and manufacture of X Ray Fluorescence analysers. The QROS development
team is purely focused on developing new techniques and field analysers.
Based on their experience and success on other projects in 2007 QROS was asked to
conduct all the screening of contaminated soil on the Olympic Park enabling project.
QROSs involvement was instrumental in seeing the project move three months ahead
of schedule.
Due to the success of QROS in the UK, 2008 saw the launch QROS US, headed by Felicia
Owen it has rapidly been involved in a number of large projects and secured the retention
of on-site analytical services by several large US engineering and environmental
consultancies as well as the US Navy. QROS is also establishing operations in Nigeria
and Australia.
