title: Evaluating the blank contamination and recovery of sample pretreatment procedures for analyzing organophosphorus flame retardants in waters.
abstract: Organophosphate esters (OPEs), used as flame retardants and plasticizers, are widely present in environmental waters. Development of accurate determination methods for trace OPEs in water is urgent for understanding the fate and risk of this class of emerging pollutants. However, the wide use of OPEs in experimental materials results in blank interference, which influences the accuracy of analytical results. In the present work, blank contamination and recovery of pretreatment procedures for analysis of OPEs in water samples were systematically examined for the first time. Blank contaminations were observed in filtration membranes, glass bottles, solid phase extraction cartridges, and nitrogen blowing instruments. These contaminations could be as high as 6.4-64ng/L per treatment. Different kinds of membranes were compared in terms of contamination levels left after common glassware cleaning, and a special wash procedure was proposed to eliminate the contamination from membranes. Meanwhile, adsorption of highly hydrophobic OPEs on the inside wall of glass bottles was found to be 42.4%-86.1%, which was the primary cause of low recoveries and was significantly reduced by an additional washing step with acetonitrile. This work is expected to provide guidelines for the establishment of analysis methods for OPEs in aqueous samples.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China.
authors.forename: Kang
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China.
authors.forename: Yumin
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Niu
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China.
authors.forename: Yongguang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yin
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China; Institute of Environment and Health, Jianghan University, Wuhan 430056, China. Electronic address: jfliu@rcees.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Jingfu
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D000327:Adsorption; D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D005411:Flame Retardants / Q000032:analysis*; D010755:Organophosphates / Q000032:analysis*; D014874:Water Pollutants, Chemical / Q000032:analysis*
chemical_list: D005411:Flame Retardants; D010755:Organophosphates; D014874:Water Pollutants, Chemical
keywords: Blank contamination; Organophosphate esters; Recovery; Sample pretreatment procedure; Water samples