Environmental samples are analyzed for organochlorine pesticides/PCB's as part of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Superfund Contract Laboratory Program (CLP). A new protocol is required because laboratories have difficulty meeting the present data acceptability criteria and because the surrogate now used is more chemically labile than the analytes determined with the protocol. The new pesticide/PCB protocol specifies an ultrasonic extraction procedure for soil and either continuous liquid-liquid or separatory funnel extraction of water. It describes clean-up procedures using gel permeation chromatography, adsorbtion columns and mercury, copper or tetrabutylammonium sulfate for sulfur removal. The protocol requires a dual gas chromatography (GC) column quantitation of 17 single component pesticides and nine multicomponent pesticides/PCB's using electron capture detection (ECD). The quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) requirements include 12-hour GC performance checks, instrument and method blank requirements, matrix spike/matrix spike duplicate analyses every 20 samples and periodic performance checks of clean-up techniques. Validation of the protocol is being accomplished according to EPA guidelines for determining ruggedness, precision, bias, detection limits, and sensitivity.
The Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Monitoring Systems Laboratory-Las Vegas (EMSL-LV) functions as the quality assurance (QA) arm of the Contract Laboratory Program (CLP). The EMSL-LV provides standards and quality assurance materials, maintains a quality assurance data base, and conducts data audits, performance evaluation studies, and on-site laboratory evaluations. In addition, the EMSL-LV is very actively involved in evaluating laboratory and method performance. Due to its unique position of receiving all of the data from all of the CLP laboratories, combined with its charge of quality assurance oversight, EMSL-LV is most able to assess intra- and inter-laboratory performance as well as programwide method performance. This paper describes the EMSL-LV QA program for the CLP as of October 1985.
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