This week I am preparing my samples to see if they contain another persistent organic pollutant (POP) called PCB.
When we look for pollutants, we first have to 'clean-up' our samples. It might sound contradictory (cleaning something that contains pollutants), but we do this to remove undesired compounds that can interfere with chemical analyses. How? Think of it like a French press at home—you try to collect as much of the coffee flavour possible while reducing the amount of ground beans that end up in your cup. In the lab, we actually do a similar trick, but use fancy columns that catch the 'ground beans' in our sample.
