On 8th March 2019, the Applus+ Chemical and Biological Testing Laboratory in Sada (A Coruña), which is accredited by ENAC, Spain’s national accreditation body, widened the scope of its accredited services to include the quality control of inland bodies of water (rivers, lakes and reservoirs) under ISO/IEC 17025:2017 standard.
Thanks to this latest broadening of its biological testing services, Applus+ now fulfils all the requirements of Spanish Royal Decree 817/2017 of 11th September, which brings together all the criteria for monitoring and evaluating the state of surface waters with
environmental quality standards.
Applus+ has included in its accreditation scope a series of “biological quality indicators”, including the composition and abundance of phytoplankton (identification and quantifying, chlorophyll a, biovolume, IGA, percentage of cyanobacteria), aquatic flora and benthic macroinvertebrates (METI index for benthic invertebrates in rivers and Iberian Biological Monitoring Working Party index). This will enable the quality of a body of water to be established on the basis of its “ecological state”.
Applus+ has accredited the sample-collection and metric-calculation protocols published by Spain’s Ministry for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, which are available to consult here.
Applus+ continues to work to protect the environment. With this new accreditation, the Group is contributing to meeting the targets set by the Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC), a piece of EU legislation that aims to safeguard and improve the condition of aquatic ecosystems for all to enjoy.