Editorial
Environmental Analytical Chemistry: Basic and Applied
T
he environmental movement has evoked great changes in the behavior of societies, governments, and businesses over the past decade. Pressure from the public sector and by government regulatory actions, as well as industry's leadership toward environmentally responsible business practices, have been particularly visible factors in the changes that have occurred. Many changes that might be argued as desirable have not yet been made. Many of these, however, have negative economic and employment consequences and are thus politically, as well as environmentally contentious. A large portion of the successful changes have been based in some way on improvements in technology. The founding of these improvements on knowledge provided by research in chemistry has been a less visible but no less real part of the environmental movement. The industrial synthesis of alternatives to chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants, spurred by concern about depletion of the ozone layer, is an important example. Research investigations by chemists have offered alternative approaches to the technology or chemical materials needed to implement policy related to pollution and risk abatement. Analytical chemistry has provided a plethora of sampling and monitoring methodologies for identifying environmental problems and for evaluating progress in solving them The articles on Environmental Analysis, Pesticides, Industrial Hygiene, Air Pollution, and Water Analysis in Analytical Chemistry's Applications Reviews issues contain an amazing variety of new analytical applications and procedures, and they illustrate the broad scope of progress. Within these articles one can find literally every mode of analytical measurement being put to use detecting and quantifying trace metals and elements, as well as an alphabet soup of target analytes: PCBs, ROX, TCDD NOX PAHs TDII VOCs, etc. The level
and quality of the analytical research efforts represented in these reviews are really impressive. Careful reading of reviews such as those cited above reveals numerous instances of workers bringing recent basic developments and discoveries in analytical chemistry (and in chemistry at large) to the firing line in fashioning new or improved environmental measurement applications. Solid-phase microextraction, the ion trap, separations based on microchips, sophisticated chemistry in membranes for ion-selective electrodes, new immunoassay formats such as the quartz crystal microbalance, and arrays of SAWs with multiple coatings are just a few examples. The emergence of new measurement tools has been (and I predict will continue to be) the driving force of innovation in environmental monitoring. Such tools and concepts will increase the speed, improve the portability, and lower the costs of doing measurements. Analytical chemistry research in areas such as the use of combinatorial methods for evaluating selectivity of reagent or coating response, natural organisms as an additional road to analytical selectivity, fast separations/MS systems based on microchips, and chemically functionalized ceramics and sol-gels pling media will be valuable for environmental analysis in the future It needs to become more widely appreciated that the activities of basic researchers (wherever located and however motivated) and the effectiveness of their interfaces with the users of analytical applications (be they people or institutions or journals) are key ingredients of environmental analytical chemistry.
Analytical Chemistry News & Features, October 1, 1996 5 8 9 A
