MILJØ213 Environmental analyses

The course includes lectures and exercises designed to provide knowledge and skills to assess environmental risk and end-of-waste criteria for environmental contaminants in soil and water, make decisions about which analyses are relevant to conduct, and understand how the results from such analyses can be used in environmental assessments and decision-making processes.

The first two weeks are allocated to short lectures and various laboratory exercises. The lectures will place particular emphasis on how sampling, sample preparation, and the choice of analyses can influence the use and quality of the results. The students will formulate their own research question based on a contamination case. Opportunities and limitations related to the experimental setup will be discussed collectively before the work is carried out in the laboratory.

The exercises will focus on good laboratory practice, theory related to the collection of soil and water samples, and pretreatment (sample preparation) of soil (drying and sieving) and water (filtration/decanting). Both the solid phase (soil) and a leachable water phase (shaking test) will be characterized. Determination of key chemical support parameters such as organic carbon, pH, conductivity, and major elements (Al, Fe, Cl⁻, SO₄²⁻, etc.) will be demonstrated and partly performed by the students. In addition, analyses of heavy metals in various fractions of the samples will be conducted, i.e., total content, leachable content (shaking test), and bioavailable content (dissolved and labile metal) using extractions and passive samplers (DGT).

The final week is mainly allocated to allowing the students to use their own and their peers’ data produced during the course period to address their research question in the form of a report describing the results and discussing what they imply for environmental risk in the contamination case. Speciation modelling using WHAM will also be demonstrated, and the results will be made available.

After completing the course, students should have the following knowledge and skills:

Knowledge:

• Ordering competence - the ability to assess how samples should be collected and handled to ensure integrity, and which pretreatment and analyses are required to address a given problem.
• Safety and procedures for working in an environmental chemistry laboratory, calibration of basic equipment, pipetting of standard solutions, and an understanding of the conditions required for accuracy and precision.
• Knowledge of leaching tests and passive samplers, and how they can be used to describe phase distributions, bioavailability, and their implications for environmental risk.

Skills:

• Be familiar with good practices for sampling soil and water, as well as selecting methods that are best suited under different conditions.
• Prepare soil and water samples for analysis using standard methods and instruments.
• Perform simple soil chemistry analyses.
• Evaluate the quality and uncertainties of their own analyses.
• Evaluate the suitability of their methods and results for determining the environmental consequences of measured parameters.

General competence:

• Be able to choose appropriate sampling, sample preparation, and analytical methods based on knowledge of sample type and analyte(s), as well as requirements for analytical quality.
• Assess the quality of analytical results.
• Present the work in the form of a report.