Simultaneous determination of seven bisphenols in environmental water and solid samples by liquid chromatography-electrospray tandem mass spectrometry

This article presents a simple and universal analytical method for the simultaneous analysis of bisphenol S (BPS), bisphenol F (BPF), bisphenol A (BPA), bisphenol B (BPB), bisphenol AF (BPAF), tetrachlorobisphenol A (TCBPA), and tetrabromobisphenol A (TBBPA) in environmental water (river water, sewage) and solid samples (sediment, sludge) based on liquid chromatography-electrospray tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Analytes were extracted from water samples using hydrophilic lipophilic balanced (HLB) solid-phase extraction (SPE) cartridges, and the extracts were further purified using MAX SPE cartridges. For the solid samples, a combination of ultrasonic extraction with the same SPE clean-up procedures used for the water samples was employed. The absolute recoveries for all analytes in the water and solid samples ranged from 57.1 to 114.3%. Good method reproducibility was achieved in terms of intra- and inter-day precision, yielding relative standard deviations (RSDs) less than 16.9 and 18.1%, respectively. The method limits of quantitation (MLOQ) for the seven compounds in environmental water and solid samples ranged from 0.05 to 4.35 ng/L and from 0.06 to 2.83 ng/g (dry weight, d.w.), respectively. Finally, this method was successfully applied to real environmental sample analysis, which revealed that all of the tested BPs were present, with the exception of BPB.