Recent advances in microwave-assisted extraction of trace organic pollutants from food and environmental samples

In recent years, microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) has attracted growing interest, as it is an effective method for the rapid extraction of a number of trace organic pollutants from food and environmental samples, due to advantages in facilitating on-line measurements, high efficiency, and significantly lower extraction time and solvent consumption than classical techniques. This review describes recent advances of MAE from the perspective of green analytical chemistry, and summarizes the main results in applications published in the period 2008-14. Finally, we compare the performance of this technique to that of traditional extraction and other recent techniques.