Fellow Travelers,

The other day, you heard from Tim McGrady regarding, among other
things, the lack of standard methods for testing of declarable
substances in materials.  As a member of IEC TC111 WG3, I want to
spread the word about the situation with the tests methods we have
under development.  Specifically, I want to address the status of the
IEC TC111 document 111/54/CDV aka CDV 62321 and the question of
whether laboratories can reference our documents.  For various
reasons, there are probably many uncontrolled copies of drafts of
these methods out there in the world.  Many changes have been made to
older versions and many changes will be made to the latest version.

The CDV was recently rejected in voting by the P-member countries of
TC111.  That means WG3 must go back and decide how to proceed.  We
think it may take as long as an additional year to fix the problems
and complete the voting/review cycles that remain in the IEC
process.  WG3 will continue working toward our goal of creating valid
test methods.

If you purchase analyses and the laboratory reports that their test
methods conform with an IEC CDV or other draft document, it means
nothing except that they are following procedures that have not been
validated and approved by IEC.  The terms CDV and draft mean the
document is not an official standard.  That may seem self-evident,
but labs may be selling testing services according to CDV 62321.  The
results of such testing would not be defensible as conforming to an
international standard.

Even with no standard test method to reference, the results of
testing by a contract laboratory may be defensible if the laboratory
has an accredited quality system AND has documented the procedures as
part of their quality system AND validated the scopes of their
procedures according to ISO 17025 or another recognized quality
system standard.  Their customers have the ability to request quality
system records demonstrating the scopes of test methods, the
validation process, and its results.

Caveat emptor!

John



John R. Sieber, PhD
Research Chemist

National Institute of Standards and Technology
Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory
Analytical Chemistry Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8391
Gaithersburg, MD  20899-8391 USA

[log in to unmask]
Tel:  1.301.975.3920
Fax:  1.301.869.0413
www.cstl.nist.gov/

Identification of commercial items in this document does
not imply endorsement by NIST or that items are

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Leadfee Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d
To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in
the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Leadfree
To temporarily stop/(start) delivery of Leadree for vacation breaks send: SET Leadfree NOMAIL/(MAIL)
Search previous postings at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives
Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100 ext.2815
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
necessarily the best for the purpose stated.