Your Standards Organization Needs You

Allow me to lay my cards straight on the table: I am a director of ASTM International, a standards development organization that serves as an open forum for the development of international standards. I also chair the ASTM F40 committee on declarable substances in materials, which has about 10 analytical scientists out of 200 members – I am also an active member on several other committees.

Standards are extremely important for society and industry; as an analytical scientist you should be on the inside, giving your valuable input. And you don’t have to be selfless about it – getting involved in ASTM can help you grow professionally too. You can simply join up and move through the ranks of the committees you’re interested in.

The insider

Being on the inside allows you to become involved in pertinent discussions before they are common knowledge – and that’s good for business because you can keep one-step ahead. It also means you gain new perspectives on what is happening around the world. For example, the interest in shale gas has led to developing methods for determining the quality of the air compared to that extracted from conventional wells. The insight gained can be invaluable; whenever a new analytical technique is discussed by the committee and people are beginning to work on standards for test methods, you know you should be taking it seriously. Of course, we only discuss open topics and we ensure confidentiality by adhering to our anti-trust statement (which is read out at every committee meeting).

As a member of a standards committee you assist with checking test methods that are written or proposed by other members – you can also submit your own ideas based on your own analytical knowledge and skills. For analytical scientists, this is more straightforward because you are likely an expert on beginning with the scope of the method, deciding on analytical instrumentation and chemicals, evaluating the results and writing scientific reports. Analytical scientists also understand that quality checks must be incorporated within the method; it is from these we can develop a standard.

From a personal point of view, I’ve been in the driving seat of a test method “F2617 Standard Test Method for Identification and Quantification of Chromium, Bromine, Cadmium, Mercury and Lead in Polymeric Material Using Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectrometry.” Given the “technical context”, I had to organize everything, deal with the feedback and build it into the method – and convince people that it had merit! Finally, after a year and a half of debating, discussion, meetings and testing, the method was finalized, which gave me great feeling of achievement. I think this example proves my point about growing professionally; you have the opportunity to take on responsibilities that may extend well beyond your day job.

A standard advocate

Let’s be clear on standards: we need them! They provide an impartial way to check quality and, in many ways, underpin commerce. Indeed, standards help to establish a sense of clear trust between sellers and buyers.

Standards development began in earnest when early American railroad engineers sought assurance of the quality of the rails they were buying to build the network. It was a big demand in the late 1800s because the field needed to establish acceptable tests that could ensure all rail manufacturers used the appropriate type of steel. Of course, over the years standards have extended to many other materials, such as gold and even rare earths.

Rare earths are an interesting area because they provide essential elements – neodymium and praseodymium – that are in high demand for manufacturing the powerful magnets used in mobile phones, hybrid motorcars and wind turbines. China is the biggest rare earth producer – and though the resources still exist in certain parts of the USA and Europe, the rare earth ore refining process uses environmentally unfriendly chemicals to extract the elements of interest. Let me explain the “rare” aspect more visually: if you plot all the elements on the horizontal axis and the numbers of atoms respective to a million atoms of silicon on the vertical axis, it produces a nice logarithmic plot. The graph would, in fact, also highlight the fact that all rare earth elements (lanthanides) have the same level of occurrence as nickel and lead – clearly, those aren’t particularly rare. The rarity stems from the difficulty in separating them. Because they have similar chemical properties, they react in much the same way, so complex chemistry is needed for extraction.

For rare earths, as with all things, analytical scientists are essential for the process of establishing quality standards. We help decide how quality will be checked, the method to be used, the concentration levels, security, speed, certainty and reproducibility – all the usual aspects. As far as I am aware, only ASTM and China are currently developing methods for determining quality parameters for rare earths; we’re working with colleagues from the magnet industry to help them determine the quality of the raw material they receive from their suppliers.

ASTM is industry driven; people come to us for methods to determine quality, and we have experts who can respond accordingly. In reality, the methods can be quite broad, involving analytical chemistry and physics. In the case of the magnet example, we wrote the method to not only establish concentration of the elements but also to assess magnetic parameters of the material.

How clean is ‘green’?

If you’re remotely interested in the environment, it could act as an additional draw to getting involved with a standards organization. As I noted, extracting and processing rare earths has environmental consequences, but there is actually a growing interest in “green mining”. Once again, the analytical scientists in our committee are involved in helping determine the level of waste (for example, lead) produced by green mining operations. Of course, legislators expect zero waste, but someone has to step in and ask how mines are measuring “zero” and which analytical techniques are being used.

The Regulation of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is another example where legislators demand minimal levels. Here, the level of bromine, cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury in electrical products – including plastics, printed circuit boards – is under scrutiny. So, if the European Union decides it wants no more than 100 mg of cadmium per kg in a computer, we establish whether the level refers to components or to the computer as a whole. Regulators are very good at passing laws, but it’s down to analytical scientists to assess how the rules apply and to devise an acceptable standard method. We investigate the options and choose the best method and techniques to achieve the end goal – which is why x-ray fluorescence (XRF) was chosen as the preferred method for checking toxic heavy metals in computers.

Being involved in ASTM is exciting and I believe there is room for many more analytical scientists. We want you to bring your experience to the table and help create the very important standards that society needs to ensure our world is as clean, safe and fair as possible. It’s easy to join and very rewarding; a small annual fee makes you a fully paid-up member with the right to vote, so long as you are the only member from your organization (if you are one of many members from the same company, then we only allow one vote to ensure fairness).

Anyone interested in finding out more should see the membership page on our website: http://www.astm.org/MEMBERSHIP/index.html

Taco van der Maten holds several positions within ASTM International as Director of the board, chairman of Committee F40 on declarable substances in materials and a member of committees D02 on petroleum products and D20 on plastics. In PANalytical, Enschede Area, the Netherlands, Taco holds the position of market segment manager for x-ray fluorescence for oils, fuels, petrochemicals and polymers.