Simon Roberts

Should you bring your PFAS testing in-house?

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

*This content does not constitute legal advice. You should consult counsel to assure your procedures comply with applicable law and that it meets your needs.

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Simon Roberts

Simon Roberts specializes in developing methods for PFAS analysis at SCIEX for both targeted and non-targeted analysis. Before working at SCIEX, Simon performed PFAS discovery research at Colorado School of Mines during his postdoctoral fellowship. He worked on projects that identified dozens of novel PFAS in groundwater and industrial chemicals. Recently, Simon has focused on educating the public about PFAS via his YouTube channel Environmental Chemistry Explained.

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