Water & Life Lab offers advanced analytical support for environmental safety and food quality through its two specialist laboratories in Italy. Accredited by Accredia and active in international interlaboratory comparisons, the lab serves as a national reference for soil remediation, biogas monitoring, and fertilizer certification.
Challenge
The lab tests soils, biomasses, and fertilizers for trace metals, PAHs, and oils/fats. Traditional extraction methods, such as ultrasonography, have proven inefficient and inconsistent, particularly with samples of high organic content. Increasing sample volumes required a more automated and dependable solution.
Solution
To overcome these challenges, Water & Life Lab used the ETHOS EASY system, which combines digestion and extraction on a single platform, with SK-15 and fastEX-24 rotors.
This update resulted in faster, cleaner extractions, higher recoveries from organic-rich samples, and reduced solvent usage and cleaning time. The new machinery also reduced cross-contamination and simplified maintenance, upholding higher analytical standards.
Background
Water & Life Lab was founded to provide advanced analytical support for environmental safety and food quality. The company operates two specialist laboratories in Italy: one focuses on environmental matrices, such as water, soil, and atmospheric emissions, while the other specializes in food testing, particularly inorganic arsenic determination in rice.
Since 2013, Water & Life Lab has been a part of the French Groupe Carso, a major player in the European market for chemical and microbiological tests in the environmental sector.
As an Accredia-accredited laboratory that has long participated in international interlaboratory comparisons such as BIPEA, Water & Life is dedicated to maintaining high analytical performance and regulatory compliance. Over time, the lab has established itself as a national reference in soil remediation, biogas monitoring, and fertilizer certification per EU Regulation 2019/1009.
The Challenge
As a long-standing customer of Milestone, Water & Life Lab has relied on Milestone’s microwave digestion technologies for over 25 years. Its journey began with the MEGA-1200, one of Milestone's first microwave digesting systems and the first on the market to include high-pressure capabilities.
With increasing demand from various industries, including agronomists, environmental consultants, biogas plant operators, and fertilizer producers, Water & Life Lab needed a solution capable of consistently handling a large volume of diverse samples.
Typical workflows include:
- Digestion of soils, biomass, and digestate for trace metal analysis by ICP-MS and ICP-OES.
- Analysis of metals in fertilizers, to comply with evolving European regulations.
- Extraction of PAHs from soils for contamination assessment.
- Determination of ether extractables (oils and fats) in biomasses.
Legacy approaches, such as ultrasound-assisted extraction systems, have proven time-consuming for extraction and cleaning operations, providing inconsistent results, and taking up valuable space beneath the fume hood.
Due to ultrasonic extraction inefficiency, water & Life Lab noticed lower-than-expected recoveries in interlaboratory experiments, especially in samples with high organic content. In addition, increasing sample loads, including weekly shipments from over 200 biogas facilities, required a cleaner, more automated, and repeatable solution.
The Solution
Water & Life Lab used Milestone's advanced microwave system, ETHOS EASY, to streamline digestion and extraction in a single platform. The system was equipped with:
- SK-15 rotor for microwave digestion of environmental, food, and biomass samples
- fastEX-24 rotor with disposable glass vials for solvent extraction of organic pollutants
This dual capability enabled Water & Life Lab to:
- Perform up to 24 extractions simultaneously using fastEX-24.
- Use microwave extraction instead of ultrasound for faster, cleaner, and more efficient results.
- Use sodium sulfate to improve recoveries from organic-rich matrices and prevent volatile hydrocarbon loss.
- Reduce solvent consumption and container cleaning time.
- Transition from semi-manual ether extraction to a fully automated microwave process for fats and oils analysis, improving reproducibility.
Glass vessels make cleaning substantially easier and reduce the possibility of cross-contamination, which is critical in maintaining good standards across authorized procedures.
The Results
By using the flexibility of ETHOS EASY system, Water & Life Lab has achieved:
- Greater sample throughput without compromising analytical quality
- Improved recoveries confirmed by interlaboratory comparisons
- Reduced solvent use and manual labor
- Improved data consistency across complicated matrices, including digestate, polluted soils, and fertilizers, leading to a cleaner workflow and enhanced lab ergonomics
The technology has become fundamental to Water & Life Lab's diverse analytical range, allowing the lab to handle routine monitoring and rising regulatory requirements, particularly in the expanding fertilizer business.
With ETHOS EASY, we completely redefined our extraction workflow. We now process 24 samples at a time, with cleaner handling and better recovery - especially in complex matrices. It is a flexible system that lets us do both digestion and extraction with one unit, adapting to all our needs.
Marco Ruggeri, Environmental Laboratory Manager
Image Credit: Milestone S.r.l.
About Milestone
Milestone has over 50 patents and more than 35,000 instruments installed in laboratories worldwide, making it the global leader in metals prep technology for the past 35 years.
Committed to offering safe, dependable, and versatile platforms to help your lab run more efficiently, customers worldwide rely on Milestone for metal digestion, organic extractions, mercury analysis, and clean chemical processing.
This information has been sourced, reviewed and adapted from materials provided by Milestone S.r.l.
For more information on this source, please visit Milestone S.r.l.