6th SETAC World Congress 2012 - 22nd Annual SETAC Europe Meeting

SETAC’s focus will be on integrating different views and disciplines, on balancing the conflicting interests of stakeholders and on addressing societal needs of the future. The goal is to develop a sustainability management framework with tools that have a positive impact on the global environment. While solutions may differ in different parts of the world, the theories behind credible solutions are global. "Think globally - act locally" will recapture its relevance at a time when urgent solutions are needed.

The 21st century demands a broader approach to sustainability, one that draws on the best of the range of environmental sciences and practices found in SETAC. The Berlin Congress will provide the ideal venue for developing a broad and credible SETAC statement on sustainability (the "Berlin Declaration on Sustainability") and for establishing a sound theoretical approach that leads to tangible results and contributes to the global Rio-plus-20 process and beyond.

For the first time one of the sessions will be devoted to speciation analysis:

Title: C04 - Metal speciation to unravel the fate of metals and metalloids in the environment using hyphenated techniques with ICP/MS detection

Proposed chairs:
Olivier Donard¹, Clay Davis^2
1CNRS UMR 5252 IPREM, PAU, France
²National Institute of Standards and Technology, CHARLESTON, United States of America

Description: It is now well understood that it is the chemical formulation of a metal or metalloids that conditions its reactivity, life time, toxicity and fate in the environment. Despite of the advances in knowledge, many "metal speciation"concepts are still operationally defined, masking the real chemical identity of the species of interest and hence its environmental significance. As a result the development of ongoing improvement with hyphenated techniques, coupling of both liquid or gas chromatography with ICP/MS as detector is now mature and allows to have excellent results for metal species determination in all compartments of the environment (air, water, sediment, soils and biological tissues). Sample preparation techniques have also tremendously progressed during the last decade bringing more focused information to unravel biogeochemical pathways or ecotoxicity aspects.
The use of ICP/MS as detector also allow to promote speciated isotopic dilution approaches, allowing to introduce quality control right from the sampling steps to the detection. It also offers overall improved sensitivity and precision in the environmental data sets offering better comparisons between data sets or trends for example. There are also very important novel aspects with these techniques in terms of environmental assessment. The overall sensitivity of the hyphenated system permits the spiking of environmental mesocosms at very low levels resulting in minimal ecological system contamination and displacement. Further, this also allows introducing differential isotopically enriched chemical species and follows the differential kinetics of transformation: kinetics a parameter most often forgotten. New trends are also now promoting the hyphenation to High Resolution ICP/MS for improved selectivity and accuracy and even to Multicollector ICP/MS bringing then new concepts for addressing high precision at the molecular level, challenges that will be needed to promote improved understating of reactivity, fate and discrimination of origin of metal in the environment. All these development plead for new reference material to improve sample preparation methods and in establishing method accuracy and traceability of the results and increase the overall confidence in the pathways and mechanisms under investigation.
Finally these developments will be most needed to follow and accompany the development of environmental regulation in Europe (European Water Frame Work Directive, the REACH legislation).