Environmental Laboratories In Canada

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By Allan Maynard

Laboratory results form the cornerstone of environmental programs. Regardless if it’s for contaminated site cleanup, drinking water assessments, discharge monitoring or occupational health, these kinds of programs ultimately rely on data generated by a qualified laboratory. Companies, regulatory agencies, legal firms and other stakeholders must be confident in these results, especially when they’re used to make costly decisions.

Testing Done in Environmental Laboratories
Today’s environmental laboratories are indeed high-technology operations, with many tests automated to cope with ever increasing volumes of work. Environmental labs receive a myriad of sample types, including water, wastewater, sea water, soil, sediment, plant and animal tissues, and air samples in a variety of forms (i.e. filters, canisters, adsorption tubes). These samples are analyzed for a host of organic and inorganic parameters — the most common being anions and cations (such as bicarbonate, chloride, sodium or calcium), physical properties (such as turbidity of water or grain size of sediment), metals (such as Cu, Pb, Cd, Hg or Ag), nutrients, organic compounds (such as benzene or chloroform), semi-volatile organic compounds (such as PCB, and poly-aromatic compounds) and microbes (such as coliform bacteria). In many cases, these tests must be performed to ultra-trace levels, the extreme being one picogram per litre for the most toxic dioxin. How small is 1pg/l? Canada has a land mass of 10 million square kilometres. One pg/l is equivalent to finding a 100-square-centimetre $20 bill hidden somewhere in Canada.
To accomplish such an array of testing, environmental laboratories must be very well equipped with a variety of analytical equipment: inductively coupled plasma spectroscopy interfaced to a mass spectrometer, gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, auto-analyzers, and atomic absorption spectrophotometer, just to name a few. Moreover, the facilities must be designed around safety and keeping non-compatible work separate. For example, a water-quality lab uses certain reagents that contain heavy metals, and must be kept separate from a trace-metal analysis laboratory.

The Private Sector
In Canada, the vast majority of environmental testing work is carried out in private-sector laboratories. Most of this work results from government-mandated environmental programs, such as contaminated site remediation, environmental impact studies and stream surveys. In most cases, government regulations create the need for this work, while landowners, developers and industries fund the studies, and then hire environmental consulting and engineering firms to act as overall project managers. These firms in turn submit the samples to the private-sector labs. This model has served the Canadian environmental sector very well and is now emulated in other counties where, in the past, there has been too much dependence on government labs. The private labs are truly independent from both the regulatory process and from the industry or project under environmental audit. Moreover, they are much better equipped to handle high workloads.

For the most part, government labs at all three levels restrict their activities to specialty research, and the overall auditing of the regulatory programs. In some cases, however, these government labs have found it to be more cost effective to outsource their lab work to the private sector. In B.C., for example, the Ministry of Environment does not operate its own laboratory but rather outsources 100% of its testing. The laboratories, in turn, donate their time by having professional chemists serve on a technical advisory committee that ensures all of the technical issues are continually discussed and resolved. This committee also advises on maintaining an up-to-date methods manual.

Laboratory Accreditation
All laboratory users and data reviewers must have full confidence in the laboratory that has produced the results, whether it’s a private or public operation. One of the keys to maintaining this confidence is to have well-recognized lab-accreditation programs.
Accreditation is defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (Geneva, Switzerland) as “the procedure by which an authoritative body gives formal recognition that a body or person is competent to carry out specific tasks.”1 For laboratories, it is the formal recognition needed to carry out specific identified tests. The accreditation covers a laboratory’s overall quality management system, and its technical capability.
Canadian accreditation is based on an international standard (ISO/IEC 17025), which is specific to testing and calibration laboratories. ISO has many other accreditation and certification programs such as the generally familiar ISO 9000, which pertains to an overall management system. The 17025 standard is similar in principal but offers a more technical standardization dimension that is unique to the laboratory sector.

Laboratory accreditation involves the following components:
•     A proficiency testing (PT) program in which the laboratory must perform satisfactorily on samples that have been made in reference laboratories and are submitted by an accredited PT provider. A laboratory should, to the extent possible, analyze PT samples for every test under which it is accredited. While PT samples are not available for all parameters, laboratories must display due diligence in attempting to source the appropriate materials. PT samples are submitted and then analyzed on a regular basis, usually twice per year.
•     An onsite assessment, in which qualified assessors review all aspects of a laboratory’s operation from basic sample management, right through to how the laboratory itself is managed. This is a rigorous process and, for larger laboratories, can involve three to five assessors auditing over a three- to five-day period. After the site assessment, or audit, a laboratory must respond satisfactorily and within a specified timeframe to any corrective actions identified by the assessment team. Once this process is complete, the laboratory is granted accreditation.
Canadian Accreditation Bodies
For the most part, environmental laboratories in Canada are accredited by the Canadian Association of Environmental Laboratories (Ottawa, ON) or the Standards Council of Canada (Ottawa, ON). In Quebec, environmental laboratories are accredited by the Ministry of the Environment.
These accreditation bodies must, in turn, be fully recognized within the international standards community. For bodies to have this international accreditation they must be signatories to Mutual Recognition Agreements of international agencies such as the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (Rhodes, Australia), the Asia-Pacific Laboratory Cooperation (North Melbourne, Australia) or the InterAmerica Accreditation Cooperation (Mexico City, Mexico). These are the international organizations that ensure a general standardization of measurement science — which of course is a necessity for global commerce. These organizations audit the accreditation bodies thereby providing Canadian accreditations the required international recognition.

Assessing Accreditation Status
All data pertaining to environmental regulations must come from an accredited laboratory. Therefore, those organizations using a professional laboratory need to be assured that:
•     the laboratory is accredited according to ISO/IEC Standard 17025
•     that the accreditation is current and in good standing
•     that the laboratory has, to the degree possible, carried out proficiency testing for all of the tests being purchased

The accreditation bodies list accredited laboratories on their websites along with a list of which tests (methods and parameters) each laboratory is accredited for (commonly referred to as the Scope of Accreditation). The list includes those tests that have been reviewed by the assessment team and, if PT samples are available, it would mean the laboratory’s performance is acceptable.

Allan Maynard is the executive director of the Canadian Council of Independent Laboratories (CCIL) (Ottawa, ON), a national association of independent consulting, inspection and testing firms. CCIL fosters high standards, strong ethics and good business practices among its members and acts for them on matters of government regulations and policy. Its internationally recognized laboratories carry out at least 75% of environmental testing work in Canada. CCIL is a strong advocate of the important role the private sector plays in the generation of quality environmental testing. More information can be obtained at www.ccil.ca

References
1.     Conformity Assessment. International Organization for Standardization. February 15, 2006. <http://www.iso.org/iso/en/comms-markets/
conformity/
iso+conformity-02.html>