Heavy metal content of wooden furniture coatings

To determine the total heavy content of wooden furniture coatings, a method for the digestion of different kinds of coating-materials has been developed using microwave-assisted pressure-digestion. The analyzes of 13 ecologically relevant metals was done with sequential ICP-AES. The method was used for investigation of 62 wooden furniture coating samples of different age. While many samples presented a low content of metals, some samples were highly contaminated with certain elements beyond 1g/kg. Older samples were often more polluted than recent ones.