Environment

Environmental issues have got publicity in the media lately due to the new Finnish environmental law and statutes becoming effective in late year 2013, public debate on industry's emissions and environmental effect on nature and EU parliament's and council's industrial emission directive become effective early 2013.

The aim of the new environmetal law and statutes is to set the goals of the program of the new government to comply with the law and EU industrial emissions directive. The industrial emissions directive of the EU Parliament and council will set new demands for the industry. According to the directive the industry has to among others use the best available technique (BAT) to limit the emissions.

The key issues of the new environmental law and statutes are the development and unification of environmental permissions surveillance, the structural clarification of the law, the assessment and harmonization of the impacts of environmental protection law and other central environmental legislation. Some of the new issues are the consideration of natural values when environmental permissions are granted and the implementation of costs of surveillance. (Source: Finnish Ministry of Environment Administration)

The stricter environmental laws and statutes for the industry has been seen in practice as tighter control limits on land, sea and in air emissions such as increases in emission costs in the Baltic Sea transport coupled with higher transportation costs, tighter control of the mining industry emissions and higher CO₂ emissions costs for industry. The aim of the new taxation legislation is to guide industry to develop their production processes to cut more of their energy consumption and emissions.

Labtium offers a wide range of services using modern analytical equipment. We provide a comprehensive set of methods for monitoring the state of the environment and assessing contamination. Most of the methods we use at Labtium in sample pretreatment and analytical methods are internationally standardized.

We analyse concentrations of metals and inorganic hazardous substances in soil and sediment samples. Our services also include a wide variety of weak extractions, which can be used to evaluate the chemical characteristics and pollution load of the soil.

In accordance with Finnish government statutes, we use standard solubility tests for basic determination of industrial by-products, wastes and polluted soil. For the follow up of water and air emissions we provide a wide array of elements with ICP-MS analytical techniques. On the following pages there are some of Labtium's services prescribed for the monitoring of environment.