PENANG, December 4 – PBAPP’s Central Laboratory (Central Lab) in the Sungai Dua Water Treatment Plant has received its 5th consecutive “IKM Excellence Award”. Presented by the Malaysian Institute of Chemistry (Institut Kimia Malaysia – IKM), this award acknowledged the laboratory’s accomplishments in the field of water testing (raw water, settled water and treated water) in 2021.
PBAPP received the award from the Director General of IKM, Dato’ Hj Mohamed Zaini Abdul Rahman, at the Berjaya Times Square Hotel in Kuala Lumpur yesterday. PBAPP had also previously received this award in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. It should be noted that 2021 recipients of the IKM Excellence Award must comply with the MS ISO/IEC 17025:2017 standard set for testing and calibration laboratories.
The scope of the PBAPP Central Lab’s accreditation to this ISO standard encompasses 32 parameters, including advanced parameters, such as: true colour, conductivity, alkalinity, dissolved oxygen content, biochemical oxygen demand, total suspended solids and total organic carbon. In this context, the daily operations of this multiple award-winning laboratory supports PBAPP’s unwavering commitment towards supplying healthy and high quality treated water quality in Penang.
The PBAPP Central Lab is equipped with high-tech equipment including:
- An inductively-coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer (ICPOES)
- An ultraviolet-visible (UV-VIS) spectrophotometer
- A total organic carbon (TOC) analyser
In 2020, during the national Covid-19 movement control orders, the majority of 1.776 million people in Penang depended on treated water supply from PBAPP to their homes for drinking, cooking, washing, cleaning and bathing. Although 2020 was a pandemic year, the Penang State Health Department and PBAPP continued to implement a joint water sampling and testing programme. The objective was to ascertain that the quality of Penang treated water complied with the public safety parameters set by the Ministry of Health (MOH) in its Quality Assurance Programme (QAP).
In total, 3,111 samples of treated water were collected and tested in 2020. These samples were taken from Penang’s water treatment plants (on a weekly basis) and at sampling points along the existing water supply pipeline network (on a monthly basis). The test results for the 3,111 samples showed that Penang’s treated water complied with the MOH’s QAP. Key test parameters include turbidity, free residual chlorine, e-coli bacteria, e.coli + free residual chlorine and aluminium.
In most cases, the results indicated that Penang treated water significantly “exceeded” the requirements of the QAP’s safety parameters. In this context, our water supply may be regarded to be amongst the “cleanest, safest and healthiest” in Malaysia, even during a difficult year.
