Leeder Consulting offer a new method for detecting various speciated metals in waters, soils, stack gases, and tissue.

Speciated metal compounds found in the environment is increasingly important as the mobility and bio-availability of metals are dependent on their chemical form.

Liquid chromatography (LC) provides tremendous separation power. By changing the pH and ionic strength of the mobile phase, a variety of ionic species can be separated in a single run. Although LC is commonly coupled with conductivity or UV spectrophotometry detectors, inductively-coupled plasma—mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) is chosen for the determination of metals and metalloids because of its incredible sensitivity and selectivity. LC-ICP-MS can not only provide detection limits in the range of 1-10 ng/L for various analytes, it can also eliminate false positives since most analytes can be identified according to their isotopic ratios in addition to their retention times.

Determination of a variety of analytes simultaneously is also possible in most circumstances since many mass-to-charge ratios can be monitored in a single run. This feature can be used to monitor interfering species to provide the most accurate results.

Leeder Consulting has attained NATA accreditation for the analysis of a variety of metals and metalloids.