Eurofins Chemtest: Working together to protect the environment

Eurofins Chemtest is one of the largest and most experienced environmental testing laboratories in the UK and Ireland. The majority of the company’s workload – around 60 to 70 per cent – is environmental soil analysis, with the remainder encompassing the analysis of water, leachate, waste, and asbestos. Over the past 18 months, Eurofins Chemtest has invested in a range of Shimadzu instrumentation, including GC, GC-MS, HPLC and TOC systems. The company has also worked closely with Shimadzu to develop a method for ultra-fast total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) analysis using the Nexis GC-2030. This set-up has the capacity to process up to 700 samples a day on just three instruments.

Glynn Harvey, Technical Manager at Eurofins Chemtest, explained:

“What makes Shimadzu different is that they offer a very personal approach. They take the time to discuss what we want – our needs and expectations – and are always honest with us about whether the instrument we’re thinking of investing in is the most appropriate for our applications. That means a great deal to us, as it shows a real understanding of what we require, and a willingness to work with us to make sure we have exactly what we need.” 

 “After-sales support and rapid response times are fundamental; if we have a problem, we need to resolve it instantly, because it very quickly affects our turnaround times. Shimadzu’s flexibility and willingness to work with us to meet our high expectations stood out. We have pretty much instant access to their technical experts when we need it, and if a problem can’t be diagnosed over the phone, they send an engineer to us straightaway.”

Glynn Harvey, added:

“The company helped Marzia Di Lillo, our organics manager, and me to revamp our existing methods. Our organics methods need to be robust enough to deal with a wide range of contamination, but the real challenge is to optimize the protocols to get the best chromatography in the shortest run time. One of Shimadzu’s technical experts optimized every step of the protocol – temperature profiles, split profiles, column chemistry, flow rates, temperature ramps, flow ramps – to streamline and speed up the analysis. Combined with the use of dual columns, rather than a single column, this made a huge difference. We can now analyse up to 700 samples a day with just three of these systems – we needed between nine and 12 GCs previously – helping to improve turnaround times and freeing up instruments for other applications, increasing our sample capacity even more.”