Mercury testing is an incredibly important process for both product and environmental safety. Mercury can be a source of toxic pollution that is dangerous for both animal and human health. Mercury compounds can be found as part of hazardous air pollution or in water or soil sources.
Mercury Needs to Be Regulated
Due to the environmental and health dangers that mercury poses, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has strict regulations governing the reporting, inventory, and use of mercury-containing products.1 Mercury’s danger as an air pollutant means that to minimize the pollution from power plants, the EPA has announced it will reinstate regulation to the amount of mercury that can be released as part of coal-burning processes.2
Other Forms of Legislation
As well as the regulation affecting power plants and air pollution, there have been updates in 2020 to the EPA’s Clean Air Act as well as reporting previsions for the mercury air toxics standards.3 New regulations and legislation mean there is a requirement for analytical techniques that can monitor mercury concentrations. Often, analytical methods for mercury detection need to be incredibly sensitive as many standards impose restrictions on concentrations in the parts-per-billion (ppb) range.
One of the most popular techniques for trace mercury detection is Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS). ICP-MS is an excellent technique for detecting trace elements in a range of sample types, including biological material and environmental samples. The reason for the popularity of ICP-MS is that it offers excellent elemental sensitivity with very good detection limits, making it suitable for detecting even low mercury levels, assuming the right use of mercury standards.
What Are Mercury Standards?
Reliable ICP-MS measurements rely on the use of standards containing the element of interest, such as mercury standards. A mercury certified reference material (CRM), or standard, is a solution containing mercury at a verified concentration with a certified uncertainty. These mercury standards can also contain other analytes with certified concentrations if necessary and should be provided by CRM manufacturer that has achieved ISO 17034 accreditation. Mercury standards are only one part of achieving accurate measurements by ICP-MS for mercury. Tuning solutions are one of the most widely used standards in ICP-MS as they can help you work over a range of measurement conditions, including with mercury standards. Internal standards are essential for improving the precision and accuracy of such measurements and, if internal standards are used with sufficiently similar mass to the analyte of interest, this can further improve the precision
However, for mercury standards, there are some concerns about the stability of such standards. An ideal standard needs to be extremely stable on a range of timescales and storage conditions as the reliability of all subsequent analytical measurements rely on the reference standard.
Mercury Standards from Inorganic Ventures
Inorganic Ventures is an expert in a range of certified reference materials, including mercury standards. We supply a range of mercury standards that have undergone meticulous laboratory stability tests, showing that some can be stable for over five years.
Through careful testing and expertise, Inorganic Ventures can help support your work using mercury standards and provide advice on the best mercury standards to suit your application. As preparing mercury standards of certain mercury complexes can be particularly problematic, Inorganic Ventures can also support you in the preparation processes for your mercury standards needs.
Find out how mercury standards from Inorganic Ventures can transform your work today and ensure compliance with proposed EPA regulations.4 Certified Reference Materials are a key part of making measurements accurate and traceable and the mercury standards from Inorganic Ventures can help you achieve just that for ICP-MS measurements.
References and Further Reading
- EPA (2022) Mercury, https://www.epa.gov/mercury, accessed February 2022
- CNN (2022) EPA to bring back mercury pollution rules, https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/31/politics/epa-mercury-pollution-coal-plants-climate/index.html, accessed February 2022
- EPA (2022) MATS, https://www.epa.gov/mats/regulatory-actions-final-mercury-and-air-toxics-standards-mats-power-plants , accessed February 2022
- Inorganic Ventures (2022) Mercury Standards, https://www.inorganicventures.com/guides-and-papers/mercury-chemical-stability, accessed February 2022