In the world of environmental testing, we all know that contamination happens. It can be frustrating trying to locate where it is coming from when you are also trying to keep up with the samples that continue to come through the door.
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Every day, you are exposed to toxic pollutants at various levels and frequencies. There are thousands of different toxins that exist in the world, most of them being directly related to the activities of humans.
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One of the most frustrating things that we here at Biotage have had to deal with when we compare PFAS methods is the lack of a common naming convention for the compounds. It seems like every scientific article and every method contains at least one compound that either uses a new name or a new abbreviation and we have to spend excess time trying to confirm that yes, we're looking at the same compound. It's so annoying!
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Have you ever heard about monitoring wastewater for Covid-19 outbreaks? If you haven’t, let me be the first to tell you that environmental chemists can monitor Coronavirus outbreaks on a routine basis. This procedure represents a scientific field referred to as Wastewater-Based Epidemiology.
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We all know that we need to make sure that we have consistency and accuracy in our data. Determining and understanding the roots of user error is the easy part, but how to minimize or eliminate user error can be difficult. A critical point in the sample prep workflow comes when we move samples from processing to evaporation. This transfer step is where most accidents usually happen, be it mixing up of samples, mislabeling of collection vessels, or even dropping the sample, all of these scenarios are detrimental to analyses providing inaccurate results or no results at all.
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I can remember asking myself this question many years ago at my first environmental laboratory job. I was manually shaking out separatory funnels for EPA 625 and 608 and each sample looked drastically different from the next as I was pouring them into each separatory funnel. At the time, I thought the term wastewater meant anything that came from a sewer pipe and that it mainly consisted of human waste. When I looked deeper into the possible sample categories for these methods, I was very surprised by the different sample types required to be tested as wastewater. With that, it prompted me to ask myself well where does it come from?
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Throughout my entire life I have always had an appreciation for water. Growing up in the Midwest, I spent my summers at the lake and winters in the snow. As a child, school taught me that water makes up ~70% of the earth’s surface and that most of that water is oceanic water (aka-salt water).
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Testing for toxic organic contaminants in environmental samples often requires the following three sample preparation steps: 1) Extraction, 2) Concentration, and 3) Analysis. The goal during these three steps is to isolate the contaminants from the sample matrix and concentrate them so they can be detected and quantified. In this blog, I will discuss the importance of understanding how different types of concentration equipment can impact your analyte recoveries and the overall performance of your extraction procedure.
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In the world of environmental testing, many labs encounter extremely dirty samples. For example, EPA Method 1664B is the protocol for extracting oil and grease from wastewater samples. More often than not, these types of samples are really dirty, requiring loads of pre-filters, glass wool, and filter aid in order to get the entire liter of water through the disk. Well, there is!
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When juggling the responsibilities of working in a sample preparation lab as well as working as an analyst, it is very easy to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of samples. There is no situation “more frustrating” then when you have a bunch of wastewater samples that need to be extracted and analyzed ASAP and there is that one sample that is so much more challenging to extract than the others.
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