The ESBs (Environmental Specimen Banks) have monitoring functions for the contemporary environmental qualities and also offer the future generation tangible information on the past environment by preserving the specimens. This entails the sampling of the representative specimen for each distinctive ecosystem, which is performed under a strict and stipulated procedure and a condition that does not allow any change in the component so that a retrospective analysis can be readily done even in the distant future. It has been more than 30 years that some developing countries started collecting a broad spectrum of specimens to vindicate the effectiveness of an environmental policy and to monitor the long-term variations of background concentrations of environmental pollutants. Though being late, the National Institute of Environmental Research (NIER), Korea, has successfully launched the National Environmental Specimen Bank (NESB) in 2009 equipped with its state-of-the-art automated cryogenic tanks. Since then, the researchers at the NESB have been doing their best to excel the existing ESBs around the world by learning and improving the expertise. To do so, they conducted a pilot study for developing and testing their own Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) based on the analysis of the examples of the other ESBs. The problems from the pilot study had been reviewed to improve the SOP to meet the requirements for an ESB, that is to say, preserving representative environmental specimens in cryogenic condition and enhancing the analytical method. Furthermore, they also need to prepare themselves to address the future challenges by providing some additional functions, which makes it distinguishable from the other ESBs. If successful, this will be a step further to be recognized as a full-fledged member of the ESB society of the world.