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Heavy Metal Index

Quality Assurance Project Plan: Phthalates and Metals in Packaging from Consumer and Children's Products

This is a quality-assurance plan, not a results report. Alex Stone wrote it for the Washington State Department of Ecology.

This is a quality-assurance plan, not a results report. Alex Stone wrote it for the Washington State Department of Ecology. Publication 12-07-022, February 2012, 20 pages. It plans metals analysis of packaging from consumer and children’s products.

Key numbers

The laboratory section says metals samples will be prepared following EPA 3052, microwave complete digestion, and measured using ICP-MS or cold-vapor atomic absorption for mercury. Table 6 then lists every metal, including mercury, as EPA 3052, ICP-MS, EPA 6020. Reporting limits are 1.0 ppm for antimony, arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, copper, lead, molybdenum, and zinc, and 0.1 ppm for mercury. Chromium is not in that table. Nickel is not in that table. A footnote defines cold-vapor atomic absorption. It does not give mercury its own cold-vapor row.

The plan does not mention wipes.

Methods (brief)

The plan is the method design for a packaging study. Results from the work that followed are in Metals in Children's and Consumer Products and Packaging. That report cites four 2012 plans and does not print “3052” or “6020” on the wipe rows.

Evidence fitness

The plan supports what the laboratory was instructed to do for packaging metals, and at what reporting limit. It does not support a concentration in a wipe.

Limitations

A reporting limit in a plan is not the detection limit printed on a later results row. Publication 14-04-014 prints wipe values below 1.0 ppm and does not restate them as less-than the plan reporting limit.

Update history

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