(Mettler-Toledo: Greifensee, Switzerland) -- Mettler-Toledo has announced an upcoming free webinar with special guest presenter Dr. Roy Helmy, global lead for analytical chemistry at Merck. The webinar, titled “What’s the Matter with Sample Prep?” will highlight the issues of sample and standard preparation in an analytical laboratory and discuss how to prevent 99.9 percent of prepared solutions being disposed of without being used. The webinar will be hosted on April 24, 2011, at 11 a.m. EDT (15:00 GMT). Register for it here.

An extensive amount of waste is generated by sample preparation methods in analytical laboratories, and as the pharmaceutical market becomes more environmentally conscious, how can this be justified?

Manual preparation of samples and standards for analytical methods, such as chromatography, reportedly accounts for up to 82 percent of solvent usage, 61 percent of labor time, and 49 percent of the out-of-specification errors reported. Reducing the quantities prepared has a significant effect on the amount of solvent and substance consumed, as well as the cost of an analytical workflow.

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