EDITORIAL
Environmental Analytical Chemistry: A Continuing Frontier Public, political, and scientific awareness of and concern about man-made effects on the environment are, appropriately, at high levels. The concerns expressed are generally about pollution—the introduction of harmful chemical substances into an environment from which they were previously absent or less prevalent. Concerns about such pollution come from many different viewpoints. A consideration of harmful substances in the human environment must take into account the location (workplace, home, aerospace, military, etc.) and the duration (long-term health and short-term toxicity). Concerns about pollution of the natural environment similarly divide into location (air, ocean, soil, etc.) and term (long-term pollution or change and short-term toxicity). Concerns about the natural environment additionally divide into those emphasizing the consequences of pollution on humans versus those more broadly placed on the survival of living species and in loss of biodiversity. "Environment" is an enormously complicated word. The world of environmental analysis is a big one, and vitally important to any characterization of an environmental effect or pollutant. Environmental research, policy, and management decisions all are incomplete, or at least incompletely informed, without some quantitative base of analytical data as a foundation. Environmental analysis is thus an important frontier of analytical chemistry. The frontier includes both the invention of the needed basic measurement tools and their applications in specific settings. Environmental analytical chemistry is not a new frontier, but it is one that in recent years has grown swiftly in scope, complexity, and consequent need for attention from analytical chemists of every methodological persuasion. It seems to be also a frontier in need of greater availability of funding, in particular for problems relating to the natural environment.
Perhaps this editorial will help to draw the attention of researchers and policy makers to the bountiful needs and opportunities in environmental analytical chemistry. For example, chemical sensors suitable for environmental monitoring should be adequately selective and sensitive toward the target analyte, and be of low cost and high reliability. Analytical chemists can be proud of their progress in devising sensors with exquisite elemental and molecular analytical sensitivity (as well as selectivity in elemental analysis); however, less progress has been achieved in providing high molecular selectivity or in fashioning robust chemical sensors amenable to economy-of-scale manufacture. Work that enhances reaction specificity to molecular analytes would be enormously valuable, but on practical grounds the difficulties in this area constrain our efforts to targeting the most widely sought analytes. Needed where specificity remains elusive is complementary work on the principles and design of miniaturized and simplified chromatographs and mass spectrometers, and on multiplexed and arrayed transducers such as optical fibers, piezoelectric devices, and ion-specific and chemically modified electrodes. In environmental analysis, considerations of cost and economy-of-scale manufacturing deserve emphasis. Rightly or wrongly, environmental monitoring is widely considered as an economic cost rather than a benefit. Analytical chemists can help to defuse this issue by lowering the cost. Analytical chemistry has played a profound role in recent decades in the health care area; there is a challenge to respond similarly in the coming decades to provide support for our environmental concerns.
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL 64, NO. 23, DECEMBER 1, 1992 · 1111 A
