Recent legislation such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Clean Air act and the Clean Water Act has inspired the application of an increased degree of analytical sophistication to the characterization of organic industrial wastes. Analyses conducted in a wastewater treatment facility or a commercial laboratory usually involve quantifying specifically listed chemical compounds. In order to meet this basic analytical requirement, the methods employed should (1) identify the analytes of interest, (2) confirm those identities, and (3) provide quantitative estimates of the amounts present in the sample. These essential aspects of industrial waste analysis may be achieved by any of the following approaches: (1) gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), (2) multicolumn gas chromatography, and (3) the utilization of selective detectors.