Defined as 'the era of plastics', this historical moment saw a very important production of plastic materials, thanks also to their chemical-physical properties such as versatility, durability, availability and above all for the low production cost [1,2]. One of the biggest current problems lies in the reuse of valuable substances to protect the ecosystem from human activities, which have led to the increasingly massive presence of pollutants ranging from plastics to pharmaceutical pollutants. In this study we report a simple recycling strategy of a waste, such as used surgical masks, to obtain an activated carbon effective in the solid phase extraction of phthalic acid esters (PAEs) from plastic bottled water. Activated carbon was obtained by high temperature calcination of surgical masks after being treated with sulfuric acid to increase their thermal stability. The morphological and structural characteristics of the sorbent prepared in this work were studied by thermal analysis, Raman spectroscopy, FT-IR, scanning electron microscopy. Solid phase extraction was used to preconcentrate the sample, furthermore, the parameters that influence solid phase extraction such as pH, amount of sorbent, percentage of organic modifier, ionic strength, volumes were evaluated. of breakthrough, the elution solvent, and its volume. The determination of PAEs was performed by UHPLC-PDA using a gradient elution. Using the optimized parameters, the method resulted linear within the range 0.25-1000 ng/mL, the LOQs were included between 0.25 and 0.10 ng/mL while the LODs between 0.008 and 0.003 ng/mL. The recoveries were included between 95.9-104.7, the precision expressed as RSD% was found to be less than 7.32 while the accuracy expressed as BIAS% was found to be between -5.75 and 5.93. The method was found to be suitable for the determination of PAEs and was compared with methods in the literature having comparable or superior performance.
Shams M., Alam I., et al., Environmental Advances, 5 (2021), 100119, DOI: 10.1016/j.envadv.2021.10011.
Anagnosti L., Varvaresou A., et al. Mar. Pollut. Bull 162 (2021), 111883, DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2020.111883.