7. Conclusion

Quality assurance and quality control are essential for chemists to deliver reliable and meaningful results to their customers. Without it, results can often be counterproductive.

In environmental analysis, quality assurance (and hence data comparability) is a prerequisite for assessing spatial and temporal contamination trends. This can only be achieved through harmonized approaches, from sampling to analysis, for the reliable monitoring of given substances in a given environment. Without the demonstration of data traceability to one (or more) well-documented reference(s), a considerable amount of data becomes unusable.

While compliance with the quality assurance requirements (good laboratory practice, accreditation, certification, etc.) described in this article is essential, it is not sufficient to guarantee the accuracy of results. For...