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Feb 18, 2021 | Blogs, Environmental / Industrial | 0 comments
Read time: 4 minutes
As the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) regulatory landscape evolves in the US and across the globe, the interest in PFAS continues to grow. Drinking water and food packaging are under particular scrutiny, and monitoring programs and requirements will continue to expand to include an increasing variety of sample types and PFAS compounds.
Organizations that adhere to these regulatory demands will be under increasing pressure to control costs as sample volumes increase. Acquiring high-quality instrumentation and PFAS analysis training is a potentially valuable cost-containment approach for any labs that require ongoing PFAS testing.
Here, I have outlined some key considerations that may help you decide to bring PFAS testing in-house.
1. Cost
The cost of third-party analysis can quickly add up to several hundred dollars per sample, especially in resampling cases due to contamination. As your testing needs grow, increasing testing volume and complexity will raise your testing program’s costs. Acquiring your instrumentation along with highly specialized PFAS-focused training from SCIEX will allow you to control the costs of testing as your test volume and complexity increase.
2. Turnaround time (TAT):
Timely PFAS testing results are needed to make quick decisions regarding the treatment and mitigation of PFAS contamination to meet regulatory requirements and protect public health. Rapid turnaround times within 24 hours, if they are commercially available at all, are cost-prohibitive in most situations. With in-house instrumentation, turnaround times of less than 24 hours can be achieved at a lower cost using fewer resources.
3. Quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC):
Testing PFAS samples in-house provides greater visibility into the entire process for your whole QA/QC system and for troubleshooting difficult samples. SCIEX can help you develop robust and highly accurate methods and automate your PFAS analysis protocol from sample preparation through data reporting to further increase the precision of the results and consistently meet QA/QC requirements.
4. Method flexibility:
PFAS contamination investigations sometimes require creative and flexible sampling and analysis protocols to track sources of contamination. This could involve performing swabs of potentially contaminated sampling environments for source tracking, performing serial dilutions of heavily contaminated samples, using direct-injection dilute-and-shoot methods for rapid screening of large numbers of samples, confirming positive identifications with full-scan methods or screening for novel PFAS that are not available at commercial testing labs.
These are just a few benefits of bringing your PFAS testing in-house. If you’re interested, check out this 1-page white paper on how the unique combination of industry-leading expertise, analytical equipment systems and consumables of SCIEX and Phenomenex can help you achieve high-quality PFAS analysis.
Do you have questions about how we can help? Feel free to either comment below or email me directly at simon.roberts@sciex.com. Thanks for reading.
Why not check out my Youtube channel Environmental Chemistry Explained
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Developing an analytical method can be one of the most rewarding jobs an analytical scientist can do, but it can also be one of the most complex and frustrating. To help guide your practical experiments and thought processes we spoke to Kean Woodmansey to benefit from his experience.
As analytical organizations grow, there is an even greater need to train scientists and operators more consistently to meet tight deadlines, handle increasing samples, and meet data quality expectations. A high rate of employee turnover also affects the productivity of labs worldwide. Consistent training helps today’s labs stay competitive, whether the goal is sample throughput, therapeutic development, or publication.
A few years ago, I was plotting along in my analytical job and keeping up-to-date with residue regulations took a considerable amount of time, but it was always manageable. Nowadays, we have PFAS.
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