Fingerprint analysis of brominated flame retardants and Dechloranes in North Sea sediments

In order to do that a fast and effective ASE extraction method with an on-line clean-up was developed as well as a GC-EI-MSMS and LC-ESI-MSMS method to analyse PBDEs, MeOBDEs, alternate BFRs, Dechloranes as well as TBBPA and HBCDD. A fingerprinting method was adopted to identify representative area-specific patterns based on detection frequency as well as concentrations of individual compounds. Concentrations in general were low, with<1 ng g−1 dw for most compounds. Exceptions were the comparably high concentrations of BDE-209 with up to 7 ng g−1 dw in selected samples and TBBPA in UK samples with 2.7±1.5 ng g−1 dw. Apart from BDE-209 and TBBPA, alternate BFRs and Dechloranes were predominant in all analysed samples, displaying the increasing relevance of these compounds as environmental contaminants.