Abstract
Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is the third most used polymer for plastic products in the European Union (+NO/ CH) and contains the highest amounts of additives, especially phthalic acid esters (phthalates). Leaching kinetics of additives from (micro-) plastics into aqueous environments are highly relevant for environmental risk assessment and modelling of the fluxes of plastics and its associated additives. Investigating the leaching of phthalates into aqueous environments in batch experiments is challenging due to their low solubility and high hydrophobicity and there are no standard methods to study release processes. Here we describe an infinite sink method to investigate the leaching of phthalates from PVC into the aqueous phase. Spiking and leaching experiments using bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate as a model phthalate enabled the validation and evaluation of the designed infinite sink method. The developed method offers:•a low-cost and simple approach to investigate leaching of phthalates from PVC into aqueous environments•the use of a high-surface activated carbon powder as an infinite sink•a tool to elucidate the transport fluxes of plastics and additives
Highlights
For the quantification of bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) in the aqueous phase and in the infinite sink, both phases were spiked with 20 mL of a 50 mg mLÀ1 deuterated bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP-d4) standard
To determine the response factor between DEHP and DEHP-d4 an external calibration was carried out using 0.5, 1, 3, 5, 10, 15 mg mLÀ1 of DEHP standards. These standards were prepared adding the appropriate amount of DEHP standard (50 mg mL-1 or 500 mg mLÀ1), n-hexane and 20 mL of DEHP-d4 (50 mg mLÀ1) to a 1.5 mL
A decreasing ratio of mW mSINKÀ1 over time indicated that the infinite sink strongly removed DEHP from the aqueous phase during the spiking experiment and kept the DEHP concentration well below the solubility (Fig. 2B), as desired
Summary
The leaching of phthalates from PVC can be determined with an infinite sink approach Charlotte Henkela,b, Thorsten Hüffera,b, Thilo Hofmanna,b,*.
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