Environmental Protection Agency methods, generally

Standard U.S. Environmental Protection Agency methods are generally used by USATHAMA to analyze environmental sanples, but these methods are not available for all compounds of interest. 

Uncertainty analysis is increasingly used in ecological risk assessment and was the subject of an earlier Pellston workshop (Warren-Hicks and Moore 1998). The US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) has developed general principles for the use of Monte Carlo methods (USEPA 1997), which provide one of several approaches to incorporating variability and uncertainty in risk assessment. 

This chapter first outlines some general principles of good practice, and then summarizes methods. The Syracuse Research Corporation (SRC) package of programs is in such wide use that some information about them is included as an appendix (see Appendix 1, Section 4.VII). They are freely downloadable from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 

While an attempt has been made to place some context on each extraction technique, it should also be noted that most of the techniques described have been validated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) in terms of standard methods. The current USEPA methods for the extraction of pollutants from solid matrices are shown in Table 7.3. It should be noted that the supercritical fluid extraction technique has three specific methods for a range of compounds of environmental importance, whereas other techniques have more general, non-specific methods. 

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