Multi-residue determination of organophosphorus and organochlorine pesticides in environmental samples using solid-phase extraction with cigarette filter followed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry

A solid-phase extraction (SPE) method was developed to extract 14 pesticides simultaneously from environment samples using cigarette filter as the sorbent before gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis. Parameters influencing the extraction efficiency, such as the sample loading flow rate, eluent and elution volume, were optimized. The optimum sample loading rate was 3 mL/min, and the retained compounds were eluted with 6 mL of eluent at 1 mL/min under vacuum. Good linearity was obtained for all the 14 pesticides (r2>0.99) from 0.1 to 20 mu g/L for water and from 2 to 400 mu g/kg for soil samples. The detection limits (signal-to-noise=3) of the proposed method ranged from 0.01 to 0.20 mu g/L for water samples and from 0.42 to 6.95 mu g/kg for soil samples. The developed method was successfully applied for determination of the analytes in real environmental samples, and the mean recoveries ranged from 76.4 to 103.7% for water samples and from 79.9 to 105.3% for soil samples with the precisions (relative standard deviation) between 2.0 and 13.6%.