ABSTRACT
The Contract Laboratory Program (CLP) is an outgrowth of efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to remedy the wide array of mistakes made in the early environmental sample analysis programs. This chapter discusses the development of the CLP. The CLP was designed and developed to support the EPA’s Superfund program by providing analytical data of a known and documented quality. The CLP is a non-research laboratory program. Therefore, the methods and operations required by the program require the repetitive completion of tasks. Therefore these methods and operations can be effectively governed by a systematic set of operating procedures, usually known as Standard Operating Procedures. In the CLP, the results of information about causes of problems in laboratory performance are not directly conveyed to the laboratory. The CLP requirements are specific, detailed, and sometimes considered onerous by the participating laboratories.
