Abstract
Ongoing pollution of the marine environment requires quick and reasonably priced analytical techniques that allow routine checking of the concentrations of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) found in different samples and, in particular, coastal samples. Miniaturized extraction techniques enable us to analyze samples more quickly and cheaply. These methodologies are highly effective for analysis of liquid samples, but not for solid samples, and even less so for microplastic pollutant analyses. A miniaturized solid-liquid-liquid extraction technique (μSLLE) has been developed to extract, pre-concentrate, and analyze up to 27 POPs from marine microplastics, using a quick methodology which does not require drying of the extract for its preconcentration. Target pollutants were analyzed using single quadrupole gas chromatography with mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The method has been optimized and validated, and was applied to different marine microplastic samples collected on the islands of Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura (Canary Islands, Spain).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (Plataforma Oceánica de Canarias, PLOCAN) for their support and sharing of their research facilities.
Funding
This work is funded by MACMAR project (Miniaturized embedded analytical chemistry in submarine robotics), C2016/90-ULPGC15_06, and Puente-ECOPLASMAR project (PROID2017010056) both from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) and DeepPLAS (Microplastics evaluation at deep water at Canary region and their chemical pollutants associated) from regional government (ProID2020010030). The first author is a beneficiary of a research grant on topics of interest to Fuerteventura from Cabildo de Fuerteventura from the 2018 call for proposals.
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Abaroa-Pérez, B., Caballero-Martel, A.E., Hernández-Brito, J.J. et al. Solid-Liquid-Liquid Microextraction (μSLLE) Method for Determining Persistent Pollutants in Microplastics. Water Air Soil Pollut 232, 171 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11270-021-05119-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11270-021-05119-x