QUALITY ASSURANCE IN ENVIRONMENTAL-RESEARCH - EMISSIONS AND FATE OF PLATINUM

Quality assurance in environmental research is related to reliable analytical methods. According to this fact great efforts were taken in the German Cooperative Project sponsored by the Ministry of Research and Technology ''Emissions of Precious Metals' to ensure the quality of all analytical data from various research groups. As there are only few certified reference materials (CRMs) for platinum available and the application of reference materials is an important measure in quality assurance and quality control actions in every laboratory, several materials have been prepared with low and elevated platinum contents as reference samples for this project. These reference samples were a catalyst sample with elevated platinum content, a dust reference material with low platinum content and a catalyst reference material with low platinum content. With these reference samples and the Canadian geological reference material SU-1a interlaboratory studies were conducted and the results of these are presented in this paper.