Context
Quality and quality assurance in analytical chemistry applied to the environment

Analytical sciences are playing an increasingly important role in regulatory, judicial and private decision-making. This is why those who demand analytical answers, and in particular political, judicial and commercial players, have long recognized the need for guaranteed results. A number of accidents in the pharmaceutical field, sometimes dramatic and linked to insufficient traceability or reliability of results, have led the authorities to take steps to organize evaluation systems. The pharmaceutical and chemical industries producing toxic products were the first to introduce strict, internationally-defined rules, known as Good Laboratory Practice (GLP). In other fields, the majority of developed countries have set up systems, known as accreditation systems, for assessing their laboratories