Inorganic Analytical Methods Performance and Quality Control Considerations
SourceThe United States Environmental Protection Agency's Contract Laboratory Program was established to produce analytical services in support of Superfund (CERCLA) site investigations and to provide legally defensible analytical results of known and documented data quality. The inorganic analytical protocol was developed for the analysis of 24 metals in aqueous and solid matrices. Methods are included in the protocol for inductively coupled argon plasma, heated graphite furnace atomic absorption, and mercury cold vapor spectroscopy. Precision, accuracy, detection limits, and other performance criteria are monitored by the Environmental Monitoring Systems Laboratory — Las Vegas. The observed performance of this protocol in the production-line analysis of thousands of samples by contractor laboratories is presented in this paper.