Determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in leather products using solid-phase microextraction coupled with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry

The highlight of this work is that solid-phase microextraction (SPME) coupled with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) was firstly introduced to the determination of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in leather products. In this work, a home-made poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) fiber was employed as the extraction phase to extract 9 sample PAHs in leather products by headspace SPME. Method development including the optimization of extraction, desorption process, and salt addition was done. The analytical figures of merit showed that the sampling linear ranges of the proposed method were 0.1-20 μg/L, and the detection limits of 9 PAHs were lower than 0.05 μg/L except chrysene with 0.12 μg/L. The developed method presented a simple, rapid, sensitive, and inexpensive method to detect PAHs in leather and was successfully applied to the detection of PAHs in three kinds of leather products. The spiked recoveries for 9 PAHs ranging from 81.7% to 124.9% also demonstrated the accuracy of the proposed method.