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Abstract. Environmental science is often the interpretation in an environmental context of information obtained by analysis of representative samples. Clever interpretations and combination of results thus may lead to new discoveries. However, without information from quality analyses, such discoveries will not be made or, even worse, one may arrive at erroneous conclusions. The environmental scientist shall be able to demonstrate the quality of his/her results. This shall be demonstrated within the laboratory (precision) as well as between laboratories (accuracy) in order to avoid bias and non consistency between data sets of different analysts/laboratories. A number of issues that may influence the quality of data, and thus of information, are discussed, including examples of possible pitfalls in sampling, sample treatment and analysis. It is motivated that environmental laboratories shall implement quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) principles to demonstrate that they produce quality analytical data, which form the basis for quality science.