Committee on Water Develops New ASTM Cyanide Standard
Cyanide is routinely analyzed in water samples, often to demonstrate regulatory compliance. However, improper sample collection or pretreatment can result in significant positive or negative bias, potentially resulting in unnecessary permit violations or undetected cyanide releases into the environment. Because of the importance and timeliness of these issues, ASTM Subcommittee
D19.06 on Methods for Analysis for Organic Substances in Water has developed
D 7365, Practice for Sampling, Preservation, and Mitigating Interferences in Water Samples for Analysis of Cyanide. Subcommittee D19.06 is under the jurisdiction of Committee
D19 on Water.
According to John Sebroski, senior associate scientist, Bayer MaterialScience LLC and chair of the
D 7365 task group, the new standard provides a single, authoritative source for solutions to cyanide sampling and analysis problems. The diverse task group, which consists of representatives of instrument vendors, industry and government, plans to reference the new standard in all of the cyanide test methods under the jurisdiction of Committee D19 to supersede previous guidance in this area.
Prior to deciding to propose this method in a formal rulemaking for adoption into 40 CFR Part 136, Guidelines Establishing Test Procedures for the Analysis of Pollutants, the Clean Water Act methods group at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expects to reference this standard on their methods Web page as a useful source of information.
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