The harm of heavy metals contained in electronic and electrical equipment (EEE) on environment is of high concern by human. Aiming to handle the great challenge of RoHS compliance, the determinations of trace or ultratrace chromium (Cr), cadmium (Cd), mercury (Hg) and lead (Pb) by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry OCP-OES) was performed in the present paper, wherein, microwave extraction technology was used to prepare the sample solutions. In addition, the precision recovery, repeatability and interference issues of this method were also discussed. The results exhibited that using the microwave extraction system to prepare samples is more quick, lossless, contamination-free in comparison with the conventional extraction methods such as dry ashing, wet-oven extraction etc. By analyzing the recoveries of these four heavy metals over different working time and wavelengths, the good recovery range between 85% and 115% showed that there was only tiny loss or contamination during the process of microwave extraction, sample introduction and ICP detection. Repeatability experiments proved that ICP plasma had a good stability during the working time and the matrix effect was small. Interference was a problem troublesome for atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS), however, the techniques of standard additions or inter-element correction (IEC) method can effectively eliminated the interferences of Ni, As, Fe etc. with the Cd determination. By employing the multi-wavelengths and two correction point methods, the issues of background curve sloping shift and spectra overlap were successfully overcome. Besides, for the determinations of trace heavy metal elements, the relative standard deviation (RSD) was less than 3% and the detection limits were less than 1 mu g . L-1 (3 sigma, n=5)for samples, standard solutions, and standard additions, which proved that ICP-OES has a good precision and high reliability. This provided a reliable technique support for electronic and electrical (EE) industries to comply with RoHS directive.
