At Envirochem, we often receive unusual samples for analysis. One recent example of this was a set of around 60 bottles collected by us from a residential property. The bottles had been found during a house clearance as the previous owner had owned his own printing company. We created an inventory of the compounds in order to request a quote from a disposal company that we work with. We plan to analyse any unlabelled substances to determine what they are.
During the inventory, we found two bottles containing mercury. Mercury is a very interesting element. It is the only metal to be liquid at room temperature and has a very high surface tension, so forms rounded beads of liquid.
We test many different types of samples for mercury including soil, water, leachates (as part of the WAC testing suite of analysis) and air (mercury fumes or dust).