Review on the Analytical Methods of Typical Emerging Organic Pollutants in the Environment

Abstract

BACKGROUND Persistent organic pollutants (POPs), pharmaceuticals, personal care products (PPCPs) and disinfection by products (DBPs) have raised significant concerns for their potential ecological threat to the environment and human health. Research on their source, detection method, environmental distribution, migration and transformation has become the hot topic. OBJECTIVES To introduce recent analytical techniques and applications for the determination of POPs, PPCPs and DBPs in environmental and biota samples, and summarize the extraction, separation and instrumental analyses of the halogenated emerging organic pollutants. To discuss future trends for improving the POPs, PPCPs and DBPs analyses and potential emerging organic pollutants. METHODS In recent years the analytical techniques for emerging organic pollutants have made great progress. According to the nature of samples, a variety of extraction methods have been used, such as accelerated solvent extraction and solid phase microextraction. Effective clean-up steps include GPC, multi-layer column and SPE. Conventional analytical methods of emerging organic pollutants have been based mainly on GC-ECD. With the fast development of chromatography and mass spectrometry, congener-specific analysis has become a mainstream method. The analysis of certain emerging organic pollutants at trace levels is now a routine due to the advancement of HRGC-HRMS. RESULTS Methods for the analysis of emerging organic pollutants in a variety of environmental, biota and food matrices have been well developed during the past several decades. However, the analytical challenge still remains for a direct analysis of emerging pollutants. For example, short chain chlorinated paraffin has more than 7000 kinds of congeners. The traditional analytical methods cannot achieve their separation, and accurate qualitative and quantitative analysis of these pollutants is challenging. CONCLUSIONS The analytical technique for emerging organic pollutants still has a long way to go. On the one hand, it is necessary to explore effective pretreatment techniques such as magnetic solid-phase matrix dispersion extraction technology to reduce the possible interference. On the other hand, it is necessary to improve the recognition, sensitivity, accuracy and practicability of chromatographic mass spectrometry techniques such as comprehensive Two-dimensional Gas Chromatography and Fourier Transform Mass Spectrometry and develop a simple and standard quantitative method.

Keywords

• persistent organic pollutants
• pharmaceuticals and personal care products
• disinfection byproducts
• gas chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry
• liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry