Boron determination in a multi element national water monitoring program: the absence of legal limits.

Directive 98/83/EC concerning the drinking water quality and Directive 80/777/EC for Natural Mineral Water demand strict control and monitoring for the presence of metals. The State General Laboratory as the official control laboratory (Accredited by ISO 17025:2005) implements a national monitoring program in order to ensure that the drinking and natural mineral water quality satisfy the requirements of the respective Directives. The National Monitoring program covers mainly metals such as Pb, Cd, Cr, Ni, As, Se, Sb, Hg, Mn, Cu, Fe, Al and B in water supplied for human consumption either by distribution networks, vending machines, mobile water containers, ground water intended for human consumption as well as bottled water. The determination of metals in water by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectroscopy (ICP-MS) is a technique that successfully meets the requirements of the above Directives as it is a very powerful tool for the measurement of metals at very low concentrations with high accuracy and precision. The results obtained indicate that metal concentrations in drinking and bottled water examined were by far, below the acceptable legal limits and even below the relevant detection limits. However, in samples of bottled natural mineral water, high boron concentration were determined and risk assessment was performed due to the absence of relevant legal limits. The present paper demonstrates the steps undertaken by the General Water Analysis Laboratory of the SGL for the validated method used by ICP-MS in the determination of trace metals including boron in drinking and bottled water.