Recent years have seen increasing rigour being applied in many industrialised countries to the regulation of industrial emissions and to the quality of water, air, food and soil. This welcome official concern with the quality of the human habitat will, through the regular monitoring of environmental media that it implies, have important consequences for the training of professional environmental scientists. Monitoring agencies will require more analysts familiar with the special obstacles that compositionally diverse environmental materials can put in the path of reliable analysis. Professionals who interpret such analyses, too, though they may not be trained in the the technicalities of geochemical analysis, will need to recognise the limitations of the analytical methods employed and understand the quality control mechanisms upon which the industry depends, if they are to draw objective
and reliable conclusions from their data.
