Abstract

The field of environmental analysis has grown rapidly in recent years, thus becoming an important area of analytical science involving innovative developments of new analytical techniques to identify and quantify trace pollutants in the environment. The fast growth of this branch of science may be attributed not only to the large number of pollutants that are being continually released into the environment from many industrial processes and generation of synthetic products but also to their physical and chemical properties. The wide array of such substances among others includes many disinfection by-products, pharmaceuticals, household wastes, agricultural chemicals, and nanomaterials. Also, the society's concern on the impact from the chronic exposures to such substances on humans, animals, aquatic species, vegetations, and also any possible climatic change, as well as promulgations of more stringent requirements from the regulatory agencies on monitoring concentrations of such substances at trace levels with high precisions and accuracy at statistically defined confidence levels to achieve high data quality, have catapulted this field over the past two or three decades from its dawn to a distinctive era. This has also entailed, along with modifications in instrumentations, sampling procedures and the sample preparation techniques to achieve such low levels of detections at a faster speed of analysis.