Simultaneous screening and determination eight phthalates in plastic products for food use by sonication-assisted extraction/GC–MS methods

Abstract

Studies on determination of eight kinds of phthalates, e.g. di-ethyl phthalate (DEP), di-propyl phthalate (DPP), di-isobutyl phthalate (DIBP), di-butyl phthalate (DBP), benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), di-cyclohexyl phthalate (DCHP), di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), di-octyl phthalate (DOP), in 25 kinds of plastic products for food use, including packaging bags, packaging film, containers, boxes for microwave oven use, sucking tubes, spoons, cups, plates, etc . by gas chromatography in combination with mass spectrometry detector (GC–MS) in electronic ionisation mode (EI) with selected-ion monitoring (SIM) acquisition method (GC–MS (EI–SIM)) have been carried out. Methods have been developed for both qualitative and quantitative analysis of phthalates. Extraction, clean-up and analysis procedure have been optimized. Determination of samples were performed after frozen in liquid nitrogen and sonication-assisted extraction with hexane, clean-up with LC-C18 SPE and analyzed by GC–MS methods. The base peak ( m/ z = 149) of all the phthalates was selected for the screening studies. The characteristic ions, 121, 177, 222 for DEP; 191, 209 for DPP; 57, 223 for DIBP; 104 for DBP; 91, 132, 206 for BBP; 55, 167 for DCHP; 113, 167, 279 for DEHP; 279 for DOP were chosen for quantitative studies. These techniques are possible to detect phthalates at the level of 10.0 μg/kg. Overall recoveries were 82–106% with R.S.D. values at 3.8–10.2%. Only one of the 25 examined samples was free from phthalates. The rest 24 samples were found to contain at least three or more of these phthalates. The predominant phthalate detected in the studied samples was DEHP.