Chromatographic method for analysis of regulated phthalates

Recently regulated phthalates do not have validated methods for testing hence their presence cannot be estimated in the consumer products. So, a rapid, sensitive and reliable method was developed for the separation and quantitative analysis of all 28 regulated phthalate contents from the childcare items, toys, and textile test specimens. Test specimens were extracted in tetrahydrofuran at 60 ºC and 60 min sonication and purified by centrifugation and filtration. Phthalate contents were separated on a DB-5MS column using helium gas as mobile phase under Sim/Scan mode. Pre-treatment factors such as extraction solvent, extraction method, dilution ratio, extraction time were optimized. Under the optimized conditions, the targets had good linearity (r2 ≥ 0.9995) in the range of 0.2 – 10.0 mg L-1. Recoveries were between 100 ± 15 % for the target analytes. Limit of quantification (LOQs) was between 0.03 - 0.05 mg L-1. The developed analytical method has been successfully applied for extraction of regulated phthalates from real test specimens containing multiple type of matrices. Detected phthalates were in the range of 5.18 mg L-1 to 1798.14 mg L-1.