A European union of environmental analytical labs
A network of laboratories for monitoring environmental pollutants sets the standards and connects researchers across the EU.
Like the proverbial blind men examining an elephant, the 11 countries on the banks of the Danube had their own views of the river and its contaminant load, gathered through various sampling methods. But in 2001, each nation sent team members to take the same kinds of measurements in the same way along different sections of the river.
The benefits gained by sharing collection techniques and data partly inspired an EU program to harmonize methods in the face of emerging contaminants in the environment. The NORMAN network, launched in September 2005, brings together 17 partner labs from 15 countries. Each lab committed to share funding and resources over 3 years to pursue uniform lab-testing protocols for emerging compounds of concern in the environment.
The consortium “is sort of a network for trust building,” says Valeria Dulio of the Institut National de l’Environnement Industriel et des Risques (France), the coordinator of the NORMAN network. The program’s main objective is to support risk assessments by ensuring the quality of data available to regulators, she says.
“The project is developing a validation hierarchy,” says Michael McLachlan, an analytical chemist at Stockholm University. The participating labs will develop protocols for assessing the “maturity” of analytical methods for emerging pollutants. McLachlan says that the network should “reduce the time from discovery of a compound in the environment to the point that we can produce reliable analytical results.”
At the same time, the project will establish a network of researchers and organizations across EU countries with specific expertise in a compound. Jaroslav Slobodnik of the Environmental Institute (Slovak Republic) foresees the ability to access mass spectra collected by other labs or researchers for comparison and identification of an unknown substance, along with toxicity data on known substances held in the main database.
Slobodnik says that the database work is well under way, building on previous efforts for numerous other European projects—including several Danube surveys that already have generated 60,000 chemical, biological, and ecotoxicological data points. Other data will come from national databases, published research, and unpublished paper records.
“The difficult part,” Slobodnik says, “will be finding hidden data, in drawers, in Excel files... . We have to see the quality of the data. People are ready to type it in.” Metadata, which mesh geographic locations with sampling or analytical standards and other details, including uncertainty values, are necessary but sometimes absent, he says.
Although most partners are from academic labs, scientists at commercial contract labs are also participating. The network has undertaken discussions on how to include industry and whether funding should remain public or private, Dulio notes (current funding comes from the European Commission under its Sixth Framework Programme).
“If we could be a part of it, it would be great!” says Ed Furlong, a research chemist with the Methods Research and Development Program at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Quality Laboratory. Furlong compares the effort to the lab procedures established by the U.S. EPA and conducted by USGS for maintaining quality control and assurance across multiple research efforts. “I’m hopeful that we’ll see something coming out of it that we can learn from,” he says.
The NORMAN network’s results have no real legal status, Walter Giger of Eawag points out, but they will still provide quality-control guidance for routine assessments by using a “peer-to-peer approach.” The program’s interlab comparison of systematic procedures could be considered a kind of accreditation, and “every scientist... is interested in knowing how [their] results compare,” he comments.
So far, the network has hosted public meetings in Europe. Its members have taken part in various conferences, including some on emerging contaminants in groundwater—“a continually moving target” of importance to NORMAN, Giger says.
The program is taking “a sensible and good approach,” says Michael Depledge, a former scientific adviser to the U.K. Environmental Agency who is now affiliated with Plymouth Marine Laboratory. But Depledge cautions that the emerging-contaminants problem “is going to be global,” as companies move to serve growing demand in India, China, and elsewhere. The network’s efforts also will unfold in a world where chemical mixtures are the norm and have become, in a way, the new emerging contaminant of interest.
Still, the NORMAN network takes an admirable step in building knowledge and “calibrating” across the EU, which will help in applying future regulations, Depledge says. “We need to be sure that if you measure one thing in one lab in Britain, you get the same results in a lab in France or elsewhere.”
