World Quality Week 2022 (7 – 11 November)
It’s World Quality Week and this year’s theme is “Quality conscience: doing the right thing”.
Along with improving the quality of our service, something we work on every day, we are keen to look at how we deliver our service to our customers, making sure to consider the impact on the environment. Below is more information on some of the main ways we are working to achieve this!
Why is Quality Important?
Quality in general is what determines a service or product as having or delivering high value. However, within a testing laboratory such as ourselves, quality is integral to ensuring we deliver accurate and reliable results for our clients, on time, every time.
We are a UKAS accredited testing laboratory (8615) accredited to ISO/IEC 17025:2017, so along with our internal quality measures, we are also audited by UKAS on a yearly basis so that they can impartially assess the robustness of our systems and ensure the quality of our testing.
As well as being accredited to ISO/IEC 17025:2017, we have also been awarded UKAS Flexible scope accreditation, meaning that, in addition to our fixed scope Biocidal UKAS accreditation, we are also accredited to carry out any Phase 2, Step 1 test under our UKAS scope of accreditation i.e., for Medical, Veterinary or FIDI fields of application covering bactericidal, fungicidal, sporicidal and mycobactericidal.
We are proud to be the only contract testing laboratory to have been awarded this accreditation.
UKAS Accredited Vegan Testing
Traditional microbiology testing utilises standard culture media including broths, agars, and other diluents. Most culture medium contains animal derived products, including tryptones, peptones and casein.
We pride ourselves on being able to offer our clients a Vegan alternative solution, by being able to perform both Preservative Efficacy Testing (PET; ISO 11930) and Batch Release / Quality Control (QC; ISO 21149 & ISO 16212) testing using Vegan alternative culture media.
We have validated all our media alternatives to ensure that it performs comparably to traditional media, alongside meeting the UKAS requirements of ISO/IEC 17025:2017.
Environmentally friendly laboratory
One of our more recent achievements was getting solar panels installed on our building, we are always trying to do our bit to help the planet so getting the solar panels up and running means a lot to many within the business.
Although we previously used 100% renewable energy for both our labs and offices, we weren’t generating any renewable energy ourselves. By installing solar panels across the roof of our building in Rossendale, we were aiming to reduce our carbon footprint further.
Now that the Solar panels have been up for a couple of months, we can see that we are generating enough energy to cover over half of our energy usage per day. The next steps for us are looking at lab & office sustainability to reduce our energy usage further, so that the energy being generated by the solar panels goes even further to cover our usage.
Electric Vehicle Sample Collections
We also offer a free sample collection service for laboratories based in our surrounding area and our collection vehicle is 100% powered by the renewable energy that we generate from the solar panels on our buildings. Anything we can do to make a difference to the environment around us whilst delivering a quality service to our customers, we try to implement as soon as we can.
Interested in learning more about Melbec or have a question about our services? Contact us!
