Optiglass, manufacturer of Starna brand optical products, is one of only five UK organisations to be accredited as a Reference Material Producer by Ukas, the UK Accreditation Service
The successful organisations received their certificates from the Ukas chairman, Lord Lindsay, at a special ceremony held on 17 July at London's Science Museum to mark the launch of the new accreditation.
John Hammond, technical manager for analytical products at Optiglass, said "Obviously we are delighted to have this formal recognition of the excellence of our manufacturing and quality processes, to the ultimate benefit of the end-user customer".
"The accreditation process involved a detailed statistical analysis of the extensive stability and homogeneity data we had accumulated on Certified Reference Materials as part of our existing ISO/IEC 17025 procedures".
"As a result of this exercise we can now offer the end-user a lifetime guarantee on Starna CRMs, providing the CRMs have been used and stored correctly, and have been re-certified every two years." Historically, producers of CRMs have used either ISO/IEC 17025 or ISO Guide 34 to control their production process but in 2004 Ilac, the International Laboratory Accreditation Co-operation ruled that to be a Reference Material Producer, manufacturers should be accredited to both these standards simultaneously.
Optiglass was the first UK producer to sign up to the pilot study initiated by Ukas to develop certification for Reference Material Producers in the UK.
Other CRM producers taking part included the National Physical Laboratory and the Laboratory of the Government Chemist.
