Sucralose is one of the most popular artificial sweeteners worldwide. Due to its high stability, persistence and low removal efficiency in wastewater treatment plants, sucralose has been used as an indicator of wastewater intrusion into aquatic systems. However, its stability has also been a reason for discussion whether sucralose’s presence in surface water could indicate a recent anthropogenic input. Caffeine and acetaminophen have been considered as tracers in human impacted aquatic ecosystems and potentially good indicators of recent anthropogenic inputs into the environment due to their short half-lives in water. Here, a novel, high throughput and sensitive method based on online SPE-LC-HRMS for the determination of caffeine, sucralose and acetaminophen was developed and validated for both fresh and seawater samples and applied to environmental water samples to evaluate the efficiency of these compounds as tracers of aquatic pollution. Caffeine and sucralose were detected in > 70% of samples, while acetaminophen was only detected in 3% of samples above the MDL, demonstrating its limited environmental applicability.

三氯蔗糖是全球最受欢迎的人造甜味剂之一。由于三氯蔗糖具有很高的稳定性，持久性和去除效率低，因此三氯蔗糖已被用作指示废水进入水生系统的指标。然而，其稳定性也成为讨论三氯蔗糖是否存在于地表水中可能表明最近有人为输入的原因。咖啡因和对乙酰氨基酚被认为是对人类影响的水生生态系统的示踪剂，由于它们在水中的半衰期短，因此可能是近期人为输入环境的良好指标。这里，一种基于在线SPE-LC-HRMS的新颖，高通量且灵敏的方法来测定咖啡因，开发了三氯蔗糖和对乙酰氨基酚，并已针对淡水和海水样品进行了验证，并将其用于环境水样品以评估这些化合物作为水污染示踪剂的效率。在超过70％的样品中检出了咖啡因和三氯蔗糖，而仅在MDL上方的3％的样品中检出了对乙酰氨基酚，表明其在环境上的适用性有限。