Who the table binds
On this page11
What part 136 is
"Guidelines Establishing Test Procedures for the Analysis of Pollutants", under the Clean Water Act. It sets the approved methods for the numbers a permit holder reports.
So it binds compliance work
A discharge permit, a regulated outfall, a laboratory reporting to a regulator. Those samples have to be collected in the container the table names, preserved the way it says, and analyzed inside the holding time.
And it does not bind a landowner or a class
Somebody sampling their own well, a student doing a project, a watershed group building a picture. None of that is permit reporting and the table is not a requirement for it.
Which is not a reason to ignore it
The table exists because a container changes a sample. A phenol sample in a polymer bottle reads low whether or not anybody is regulated, and a wrong number is a wrong number.
So this property uses it as physics
The best available published statement of what a container does to a water sample, which is exactly what a packaging catalog should be reading.
It is a water table
Table II covers water parameters: bacterial, toxicity, inorganic, organic, protozoan. One of the five leaves in this group is water.
Soil is elsewhere
Soil and waste methods live under SW-846 with their own container and holding time guidance. This property does not borrow the water numbers for soil, because they are not the same numbers.
And the botanical leaves have no table at all
Leaf, pollen and seed have no comparable federal container table. What they have is a set of physical requirements, and those pages say so rather than inventing an authority.
The one thing that is universal
A sample is a measurement, and a container that adds to it or takes from it has broken the measurement before the laboratory opens the lid.
Read the table section next
Five container codes, one of which our largest material group does not belong to. That is the finding this property exists to deliver.