The Environmental Technology Verification Program (ETV) has been established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate the performance characteristics of innovative environmental technologies across all media and to report this objective information to the permitters, buyers, and users of environmental technology. ETV has evolved in response to the following mandates: A directive to EPA by the President in his 1995 environmental technology strategy, Bridge to a Sustainable Future, to work with the private sector to establish a market-based verification process...which will be available nationally for all environmental technologies within three years; Goals articulated in the Vice-President's Reinventing Government; A Performance Review which directed EPA to begin a comprehensive environmental technology verification program no later than October 1995; and Congressional appropriation language contained in the FY96 and FY97 budgets, that the Agency fund technology verification activities at the $10 million level in each year. To comply with these directives, EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD) has established a five year pilot program to evaluate alternative operating parameters and determine the overall feasibility of a technology verification program. ETV began in October 1995 and will be evaluated through October 2000, at which time the Agency will prepare a report to Congress containing the results of the pilot program and recommendations for its future operation. Because credible information is the ultimate product of ETV, the highest appropriate quality assurance procedures will be used throughout the program. The EPA's Office of Research and Development implements an Agency-wide quality system to assure that activities conducted in EPA research laboratories, other EPA research facilities or locations, or at facilities being operated on behalf of or in cooperation with the EPA are supported by data of known and acceptable quality for their intended use. Individual research laboratories develop laboratory-specific quality management plans. The National Risk Management Laboratory (NRMRL) and the National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) are implementing ETV in conformance with such plans.