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Environmental Analysis - Focus on Mercury Interested in advertising online?
www.envirotech-online.com Momentum Builds for ‘Mercury 2013’
Mercury is moving towards the top of the agenda for regulatory bodies and interest from the public domain is growing. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) now defines mercury as “the pollutant of greatest concern”.
In response to this, the organisers of the 11th International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant (ICMGP) are finalising plans for an event that will bring together the world’s leading authorities on mercury pollution to ensure that global action on this pollutant is coordinated and effective.
Previous ICMGP events took place in Canada, USA, Germany, Brazil, Japan, Slovenia and China. Mercury 2013 will be held at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, Scotland, from 28th July to 2nd August 2013, for more details visit
www.mercury2013.com.
Sessions will include themes such as monitoring, environmental biogeochemistry, atmospheric transport and human exposure. The conference is timely because it follows the finalisation of the UNEP Global Legally Binding Instrument on Mercury. Delegates may be particularly interested in special sessions which reflect the tagline of the Mercury 2013 which is: ‘Science Informing Global Policy’. The ICMGP will provide that important link between those governments, regulatory authorities and industries that need answers to their mercury issues and those scientists and organisations with expertise to provide the most appropriate solution.
The overall objective of the UNEP convention is to protect human health and the environment from anthropogenic releases of mercury and its compounds. Since mercury touches many areas of global science, the conference programme promises to be diverse and interesting, covering occupational exposure by small scale gold miners and indigenous fish-eating communities, cleaning contaminated land, reducing emissions from industries such as coal combustion and cement production, and handling mercury containing materials such batteries and even dental amalgam.
Mercury 2013 is expected to attract between 800 and 1200 delegates and will include an exhibition featuring all of the world’s leading organisations connected with mercury. The organisers have announced that, even though the event is nearly a year away, only a few stands remain and these will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. For further information, visit
www.mercury2013.com.
Reader Reply Card No. 53
Unrivalled Mercury Analysis Performance
At the forefront of environmental monitoring since 1983, P S Analytical (UK) manufactures instrumentation for Mercury measurements in a wide range of applications. The Millennium Merlin is a laboratory based instrument utilising cold vapour atomic fluorescence spectrometry (CV-AFS). This approach offers unrivalled analytical performance including sub ppt detection limits, high sensitivity, seven orders of magnitude linearity and rapid speed of analysis with uncompromised accuracy and precision.
The Merlin’s special cell design and off scale recognition feature eliminates carry-over from high concentrations of mercury - which is a recognised problem when analysing samples of unknown concentration. A range of options are available, including amalgamation (which can be used for lowering detection limits in water samples, elemental mercury in soil and also gas and headspace analysis) and UV photolysis - for automated online digestion of aqueous samples containing organic mercury or as a speciation interface with liquid chromatography when speciation is required.
These products offer a complete solution for Hg fractionation in soil which is of particular importance to research, contract and governmental laboratories involved in the remediation of contaminated land sites.
Reader Reply Card No. 54
Do More with the CETAC Quicktrace M-7600 Mercury Analyser: The Analysis of Trace and Ultra-Trace Mercury in Fish Tissue
Why Analyse Fish Tissue?
The predominant source of human exposure to mercury, via the diet, is fish and seafood. Such a foodstuff is subject to European Commission Regulation (EC) # 1881/2006 that sets maximum concentration limits of mercury to ensure food safety. Lower and higher order fish have maximum allowable concentrations of 0.5 and 1.0 mg/Kg (wet weight) respectively. Many laboratories require the capability to measure mercury at 100 times lower than these levels to ensure confident quantification.
CETAC (UK) have recently launched the CETAC Quicktrace M-7600 Cold Vapour Generation Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer (CVAAS) Mercury Analyser that provides high through- put and accurate determination of mercury from a method detection limit (MDL) of 1 ng/L.
Experimental
Tissues of lower and higher order fish were obtained for analysis and NIST 1946 – Lake Superior Fish Tissue was studied to ensure quality control. Analyses were performed using the M-7600 and were validated against analyses using the CETAC Quicktrace M-8000 Cold Vapour Generation Atomic Fluorescence Spectrophotometer (CVAFS) in non-gold trap mode. Tissue samples were digested (via exposure to HNO3, H2SO4, KMnO4, K2S2O8, HCL and heat) prior to analysis.
Results
MDLs of 1 and 3 ng/L were established for the M-7600 and M-8000 respectively as well as accuracy recoveries of 89 % and 87 % for NIST 1946 (within the ± 20 % required by European Commission Directive 2001/22/EC), confirming instrument sensitivity and stability. Matrix spike analysis of NIST 1946 yielded measurement recoveries of 102 % for both instruments. The measurement of mercury in the fish tissues studied was between 0.03 and 1.10 mg/Kg (as shown in Figure 1), well within the analytical capability of both instruments.
1.2 1.4
0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
0
Orange Roughy
Halibut Swordfish Tuna Cod Salmon Tilapia
Figure 1. Concentration data generated following analysis of fish tissue digests using the CETAC Quicktrace M-7600 and M-8000 Mercury Analysers.
Conclusion Reader Reply Card No. 55
The CETAC Quicktrace M-7600 Mercury Analyser offers robust and accurate measurement of mercury at ultra-trace and trace levels.
Reader Reply Card No. 56
M-7600 M-8000
IET November / December 2012
www.envirotech-online.com
Mercury Concentration (mg/Kg)
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