Accreditation
Our laboratory was accredited by the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) for specific tests and to comply with the requirements of ISO/IEC 17025 which was first issued in 1999 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). It is the single most important standard for calibration and tested in laboratories around the world. Laboratories that are accredited to this international standard have demonstrated that they are technically competent and able to produce precise and accurate test and/or calibration data.
What is Accreditation?
Accreditation is a voluntary, third party-reviewed process. As part of accreditation, our laboratory’s quality control management system was thoroughly evaluated on a regular basis to ensure continued technical competence and compliance with ISO/IEC 17025. Laboratory accreditation can only be granted by an accreditation body, such as the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) or the Canadian Association for Laboratory Accreditation (CALA).
MOECC Licensing
At CanWest Environmental, our laboratory was licensed to test drinking water for lead by the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change (MOECC).
The new MOECCO. Reg. 243/07 regulation requires that sampling requirements are as per these published rules to obtain “representative” samples, including:
1) “If a drinking water fountain also has a filling station, you would need to submit two sets of samples for this fixture. You must also sample each part of the fixture on a different day, e.g., sample the fountain on one day and the filling station another day”, and;
2) “Drinking water fixtures being sampled on the same day should not be too close to one another to ensure all samples collected are from water that has been standing in the plumbing. The following can help you determine whether two sampling locations are too close: 1 litre of water is contained in approximately 26 feet of 1/2 inch copper pipe or 12 feet of 3/4 inch copper pipe”.
View more information about O. Reg. 243/07 here.
