The Impact of ILM05.3 on ICP-MS Trends and opportunities - Bill Spence

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) was formed in 1970 in order to cope with increasing public demand to improve environmental quality. Among its many activities is the monitoring of contaminated or potentially contaminated sites within the Superfund program, created under the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), and currently under the 1986 Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA). In order to do this, the EPA’s Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation (OSRTI) use contract laboratories within their Contract Laboratory Program (CLP) to provide analytical services by following statements of work (SOWs) that include comprehensive, prescriptive analytical methodologies. In 2001 the inorganic SOW, ILM05.2, was released. This gave full methodological details on the analysis of various parameters including metallic analytes, cyanide and mercury using techniques such as atomic absorption spectrophotometry (AAS), inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES) and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) (see Box 1). In February of this year, this SOW was superseded by ILM05.3. This article describes the update as it affects ICP-MS and shows how current ICP-MS instrumentation can be used to comply with this latest US EPA methodology. This methodology is also important to non-CLP labs that want to offer a CLPlike service to their customers.