Determination and fate of organic pollutants in the environment

Different sample preparation methodologies were evaluated for the determination of pollutants in different matrices. The methods investigated were chosen on the merits of decreased sample preparation time and low toxic solvent consumption with the aim to provide viable alternatives to more laborious methods, such as, Soxhlet extraction. Techniques were developed to extract and quantify organic pollutants from contaminated soils and water. The results from shake flask extraction of aged phenolic contaminated soils were used in attempt to relate sorption to both the soil, and pollutant properties. This was to help gain an understanding of the transport and fate of phenols in different environmental situations. The partitioning (sorption/desorption) of radiolabelled phenols between aqueous solution and soil was investigated using a modified shake flask technique. This provides additional information which can be related to soil characteristics, hence pertaining to the fate mechanisms involved for phenols in the environment. The results from these investigations suggest that more than one factor contributes to the sorption of phenols in soils. Solid phase microextraction (SPME) was initially evaluated as a semi-qualitative tool for the extraction of analytes from several different matrices. The use of SPME was further applied to full qualification and quantification of extracted chlorobenzenes and PAH's from soils and water samples. Shake flask, accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) and Soxhlet were also used, to allow comparison with SPME. The work involving SPME showed that with further method modification this technique may be used for a diverse range of future applications for the extraction and quantification of analytes from liquid or solid matrices. The methods used to quantify the levels of extracted pollutants in these experiments were high performance liquid chromatography with ultraviolet detection (HPLC-UV), liquid scintillation spectrometry (LSS), gas chromatography with electron capture detection (GC-ECD) and mass spectral detection (GC-MS)