Application of a Novel Slurry Furnace AAS Protocol for Rapid Assessment of Lead Environmental Contamination

The slurry method of sample introduction for electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry (slurry-ETAAS) provides a unique combination of minimal sample preparation, proven accuracy, low cost instrumentation, and rapid and unattended sample throughput that makes it ideal for the evaluation of large numbers of samples for toxic element contamination. Lead is one of the elements most easily determined by the slurry method, since it readily extracts into the solvent phase, thus maximizing precision and accuracy. The method appears to provide adequate accuracy for survey analyses at lead concentrations greater than 0.01%, which is the range of primary concern. The only significant limitation of the slurry-ETAAS method, as we used it, is the sequential nature of the atomic absorption measurement, which limits the range and speed of multielement analysis on selected samples. It is quite adequate for rapid surveys when a limited number of known toxic elements are being investigated.