Concept

The official guidelines for the operation of the German Environmental Specimen Bank are laid down in a concept document.

To fulfil the precautionary principle, a scientific infrastructure, a broad database to describe and evaluate the current state of the environment and long term monitoring of the physical and chemical processes in the environment in time and space are neccessary. The German Environmental Specimen Bank collects and stores human samples from specific cities in combination with ecologicaly representative environmental samples. The samples are then analyzed on health and environmentally relevant substances. This way the success of environmental policies can be monitored for example conderning restrictions of chemicals or voluntary waiving of use by industry.

The current version of the Concept of the German Environmental Specimen Bank - 2023 (PDF, 580 KB, in German) has been in force since July 2023. 

The previous version of the Concept of the German Environmental Specimen Bank - 2014 (PDF, 700 KB, in German) was in force from December 2014 to the end of June 2023. 

An older version of the Concept of the German Environmental Specimen Bank - 2008 (PDF, 200 KB) was in force from October 2008 to the end of November 2014. Older versions of the concept are not provided here.