Methodologies for Soil and Sediment Fractionation Studies

The analysis of soils and sediments for pollutants is increasingly required in today’s industrial world. It is therefore important that extraction procedures used for environmental risk assessment studies, production of certified reference materials and applications of extraction schemes are standardised throughout the scientific community. Dealing specifically with operationally-defined extraction methods for the determination of fractions of elements in soil and sediment matrices, this text brings together the work of a number of different international laboratories. Single and sequential extraction procedures are described before a summary of the latest research on extraction/leaching tests for the determination of trace organic compounds in wastes is presented. This is followed by an outline of an international network which aims to standardise extraction and leaching methodologies for their applications to various environmental matrices.