UICC Asbestos Standards
Certification issues and Certificate of Conformity
We are being asked, with an increasingly greater frequency, to provide a C of C (Certificate of Conformity), mainly by those working in laboratories who are either undergoing or about to undergo some kind of rigorous accreditation program.
The UICC reference samples were developed a number of years ago, as part of a world-wide research effort and in a very different quality climate. Basically, what was done was to obtain a relatively large amount of material, homogenize it, characterize it and distribute it to a number of end users, manufacturers and sub-distributors. A great deal of analytical data was indeed developed on them for a variety of purposes, and various results were published in a number of different scientific journals and trade publications. In so far as we have been able to determine, there was never a master compilation of this data, and it has to be obtained by going to the different publications.
The material was intended for use in research programs in a time when questions of certification simply did not arise; scientists shared materials with each other, acknowledged the source and went on with their work.
The result is that SPI Supplies, which obtained some of the original material and has been offering it to our customers for many years, has no basis on which to certify the material; the source documents simply do not exist. We can tell our customers that we are indeed providing the original material, but we cannot provide a customer with a document that will be of assistance in meeting the requirements of a quality system.
Most quality systems allow for the use of the fundamental properties of matter, rather than traceability, as the basis for using a reference sample. Clearly the material we provide is what we describe it to be, and any competent asbestos analyst can verify this. It has the considerable benefit of having been homogenized so that a very small amount can be used for any test, without concern that the portion used might not be representative of the material as a whole, but it simply does not have the documentation that a rigorous assessor would require under an ISO 9000-type quality system.
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Tuesday February 07, 2012
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