Abstract
Chemcatcher® and POCIS passive sampling devices are widely used for monitoring polar organic pollutants in water. Chemcatcher® uses a bound Horizon Atlantic™ HLB-L sorbent disk as receiving phase, whilst the POCIS uses the same material in the form of loose powder. Both devices (n = 3) were deployed for 21 days in the final effluent at three wastewater treatment plants in South Wales, UK. Following deployment, sampler extracts were analysed using liquid chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Compounds were identified using an in-house database of pharmaceuticals using a metabolomics workflow. Sixty-eight compounds were identified in all samplers. For the POCIS, substantial losses of sorbent (11–51%) were found during deployment and subsequent laboratory analysis, necessitating the use of a recovery factor. Percentage relative standard deviations varied (with 10 compounds exceeding 30% in both samplers) between individual compounds and between samplers deployed at the three sites. The relative performance of the two devices was evaluated using the mass of analyte sequestered, measured as an integrated peak area. The ratio of the uptake of the pharmaceuticals for the POCIS versus Chemcatcher® was lower (1.84x) than would be expected on the basis of the ratio of active sampling areas (3.01x) of the two devices. The lower than predicted uptake may be attributable to the loose sorbent material moving inside the POCIS when deployed in the field in the vertical plane. In order to overcome this, it is recommended to deploy the POCIS horizontally inside the deployment cage.
Highlights
Monitoring of various types of pollutants in water bodies is of a global concern
As polar organic compound integrative sampler (POCIS) and Chemcatcher® are of similar design and use the same receiving phase sorbent, it was expected that both would sequester a similar range of chemicals, but with varying amounts, at the three wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) deployment sites
There was a difference in the pore size of the PES membrane; the POCIS used 0.1 μm pore size, whilst the Chemcatcher® used 0.2 μm pore size, this difference was not thought to significantly influence uptake rates due to the small molecular size (< 1000 Da) of the compounds sequestered
Summary
Monitoring of various types of pollutants in water bodies is of a global concern. In order to achieve this, advanced, high confidence, analytical workflows are needed to screen (e.g. targeted and untargeted analyses) for the presence or absence of a wide range of pollutants. Such analyses rely on the use of high-resolution accurate mass systems including, time-of-flight (TOF), quadrupole time-offlight (Q-TOF) and Orbitrap instruments (Rimayi et al 2019; Pinasseau et al 2019; Abdallah et al 2019). When coupled to ultra-high performance liquid chromatography detection limits in the low ng L−1 range can be achieved using these systems (Acena et al 2015)
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