Environmental Monitoring: Making MCERTain with Accreditation By Jon Murthy, UKAS Marketing Manager


Prior to the recent economic downturn, it appeared that environmental issues had been pushed towards the top of the corporate agenda. This, allied with a tremendous growth in consumer interest in green matters, meant that the environment become a vital day to day issue for most companies. When the recession hit, it understandably raised fears long term environmental and sustainability programmes would be abandoned in favour of short term cost savings. However, in practice environmental impact management has remained a priority for the vast majority of companies, across all industries. In addition to the growth in the number of environmental schemes available to businesses, the already established schemes have expanded to cover a wider remit.


Emissions Monitoring Any industrial process operator with a permit from the Environment Agency will be aware that it is required to ensure that the continual monitoring of process emissions is performed correctly to check that emissions stay within the legally permitted limits. Many process operators choose to use the services of a third party organisation to carry out this monitoring.


Procurers of environmental sampling and analysis services need assurances that the organisation they employ is technically competent and will deliver accurate results. Traditionally, many procurers have relied upon ISO 9001 certification as a demonstration of competence. However, ISO 9001 is not a technical standard, and only relates to the management systems employed by the company.


Since its publication in 1999 the international standard ISO/IEC 17025 has been recognised as the standard for assessing technical competence in this area. ISO/IEC 17025 is necessarily flexible to allow its application over a wide variety of fields, so the standard recognises the need for sector- specific interpretations to be used with it. |54| ENVIRONMENT INDUSTRY MAGAZINE


One such sector-specific interpretation has been adopted by the Environment Agency (EA) when it introduced its Monitoring Certification Scheme (MCERTS) as the framework for businesses to meet the EA’s quality requirements. The MCERTS standards contain specific requirements about how sampling and analysis must be reported, the expected minimum precision and accuracy of data, qualification requirements for staff and rules on the content of quotations and contracts. All of these areas provide additional confidence in the consistency of data produced. In certain circumstances the use of an organisation with the relevant accreditation to ISO/IEC 17025 for MCERTS is mandatory.

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