Electrochemical determination of bentazone using simple screen-printed carbon electrodes

Alemnew Geto,Jafar Safaa Noori,John Mortensen,Winnie E Svendsen,Maria Dimaki

doi:10.1016/j.envint.2019.05.009

Alemnew Geto, Jafar Safaa Noori + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2019.05.009

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Abstract

Bentazone is one of the most problematic pesticides polluting groundwater resources. It is on the list of pesticides that are mandatory to analyze at water work controls. The current pesticide measuring approach includes manual water sampling and time-consuming chromatographical quantification of the bentazone content at centralized laboratories. Here, we report the use of an electrochemical approach for analytical determination of bentazone that takes 10 s. The electrochemical electrodes were manually screen printed, resulting in the low-cost fabrication of the sensors. The current response was linearly proportional to the bentazone concentration with a R2 ~ 0.999. We demonstrated a sensitivity of 0.0987 μA/μM and a limit of detection of 0.034 μM, which is below the U.S. Health Advisory level. Furthermore, the sensors have proved to be reusable and stable with a drop of only 2% after 15 times reuse. The sensors have been applied to successfully quantify bentazone spiked in real groundwater and lake water. The sensing method presented here is a step towards on-site application of electrochemical detection of pesticides in water sources.

Highlights

Pesticides are biologically active compounds commonly used in agriculture to increase yield and food production by protecting crops from organisms including insects, plants, fungi, rodents and nematodes (Salman and Al-Saad, 2012)
The performance of the fabricated sensor was evaluated by conducting cyclic voltammetry (CV) on ferri/ferrocyanide at different scan rates (Fig. 2a)
The measured potential separation is around 59 mV for all tested scan rates, ; the position of the peak potential is dependent on the scan rate, which makes the electrochemical sensor only quasi-reversible

Summary

Introduction

Pesticides are biologically active compounds commonly used in agriculture to increase yield and food production by protecting crops from organisms including insects, plants, fungi, rodents and nematodes (Salman and Al-Saad, 2012). Bentazone has high solubility in water, resistance to hydrolysis and high mobility in soil It may leach from soil into groundwater, and may contaminate surface water through effluents from production plants, drainage waters and actual water use (Bruzzoniti et al, 2016). As a result, it is frequently detected in ground and surface waters at concentrations above the European Union (EU) threshold for drinking water (0.1 μg/L) (Cañero et al, 2012; Wang et al, 2015; Noori et al, 2018). The United States Environmental Protection agency has set a health advisory limit of 0.3 mg/L BTZN in drinking water (Environmental Protection Agency, 2012)

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