Heavy metal determination in sea water and in marine organisms with the aid of flameless ASS. IV: Description of a routine method for the determination of cadmium in small samples of biological material.

Some important environmental poisons, e.g. the element cadmium, are rather volatile during flameless AAS determination. This causes difficulties the in case of matrices consisting of large amounts of salts and organic materials. Therefore, as an example in the case of cadmium, a detailed method has been developed. The following method is now used for determinations in large series of samples. Its main advantages are: the sample size must not exceed the mg to microng range; the digestion takes place in small polypropylene tubes and in the graphite tube itself; to obtain high accuracy, a special device for the flamless AAS is used. An intercalibration exercise will be described elsewhere.