MCerts for Europe

Andrew Chappell of the Environment Agency on the emergence of a Europe-wide certification for emissions monitoring devices:

MCERTS is now a well established scheme in the UK, where it has become a widely recognised mark of quality for instruments used to monitor emission to water.

Over 200 MCERTS certificates have been issued, including 44 for water instruments from 21 different manufacturers, with more expected in the near future.

MCERTS certification has been used to help select equipment in other countries. Feedback has also indicated demand from both end users and suppliers for a common standard, based on the MCERTS performance standards, across Europe. This would remove the need for repeated testing in different countries.

To achieve this, a CEN working group has been formed to develop the performance standard with active participants from Germany, France, Austria, Norway, Ireland, The Netherlands and UK.

Like MCERTS, the standard is to have three parts: defining the test requirements for automatic samplers, on-line analysers and portable instruments. It will include a range of measurement parameters, and have agreed test procedures and performance criteria for many water instruments.

Details of the certification procedure will be defined in national documents so the MCERTS standard will be amended to include the CEN test procedures and describe the certification process which will be used within England and Wales.

This will allow countries to accept test results from other countries, where they have used the new test procedures and will create a much wider certification scheme with recognition across Europe.

This should encourage more manufacturers to put their equipment through MCERTS certification, offering the users of monitoring equipment a wider choice.

An advisory group has been created within the UK including instrument manufacturers, trade associations and other interested bodies to assist with drafting the standard.

The group is open to anyone interested in these documents and is organised through the Water Monitoring Association. It ensures that industry views are central to this process and has produced a collective effort to develop a set of tests and requirements which are meaningful without creating unduly expensive test procedures.

The draft of part 1, for automatic samplers, has already been discussed in detail and submitted for ‘CEN Enquiry’. The deadline for comment on part 1 is 9 Dec.

Development of  the draft of part 2, which will cover on-line analysers, is proceeding and should be complete by the end of 2012. This will also be published for public comment. The draft of part 3 is planned for completion early in 2013.