Country’s leading air sample testing lab offers NZ-first

17 June 2011

Hamilton, New Zealand – Hill Laboratories recently announced it now offers New Zealand’s first and only passivated canister air sampling service.

Offering the service to customers required hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment into equipment by the company. Hill Laboratories Air Quality Laboratory Manager, Dr Ian Graves, says rolling out the new service is part of the company’s commitment to delivering the latest testing technologies to its customers.

“The canister sampling service we’re now offering was previously only offered by overseas laboratories and we’ve introduced this technology to the New Zealand market. It is such a huge leap forward in terms of technology, cost savings and ease of use for air sampling that Hills wanted to help our customers gain access to it.

“Users of the canister sampling service no longer need to go through the timely and costly exercise of calibrating a pump for sample collection. Plus, vinyl chloride can be collected and analysed from the same sample as less volatile, chlorinated VOCs, which also saves a lot of time and money for the user compared to sorbent tube sampling,” explains Dr Graves.

Hill Laboratories, through its five labs located in Hamilton and Christchurch, tests over 5000 air samples each year.

Dr Graves says since launching the canister sampling service in March, the new technology has especially appealed to environmental consultants working on contaminated sites with vapour issues.

Glenn Veart, Managing Director of Air Resource Management Ltd in Henderson, was one of the first consultants to use the service and says “the canisters make the whole sampling process cleaner, easier and quicker than methods we’ve used in the past. The cost of the service is justified in the quality and speed of sampling and the accurate analysis received through Hills.”

Hill’s canister sampling service has been accredited by International Accreditation New Zealand (IANZ). The canisters can be used for testing: soil vapour, sub-slab and vapour intrusion, ambient air, and grab samples.

Canisters are constructed of stainless steel with all internal surfaces coated with Silonite®, making the surface inert. This ensures the integrity of the sample once contained in the canister. Following use, canisters are cleaned through a special process by Hill Laboratories and made available for reuse.

For more information on Hill’s canister sampling service, visit www.hill-laboratories.com/canister.

ENDS

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