A European team came together to establish standardised methods to achieve accurate measurements. C ontrolling the amounts of certain metals in the environment has become increasingly important. While it is vital to consume small amounts of many metals to maintain good health, some metals cause particular concern if exposure is above the recommended limit. These metals include cadmium, chromium, copper, nickel, lead and zinc. Problems with the levels of these metals are often due to industrial waste being dumped in landfill sites and sewage sludge.
Regulations establish maximum permissible metal concentration limits.
However, measuring the levels of these metals in the environment provides many technical and analytical barriers which must be surmounted if the measurements are to be meaningful and reliable. The main difficulty is that the bio-availability and mobility of the various metals strongly depends on the chemical forms of the respective metals, which all have different properties. Solubility will differ dramatically. It is much more important to be able to measure the levels of metals which become accessible to the food chain, or are easily mobilised, rather than determining total metal content of soils. The availability of the metals to the ground water and to the food chain mainly depends on how strongly the metal is attached to the soil or sediment.