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The Ministry of the Environment of Denmark has published: Recent technological developments in novel analytical high-resolution mass spectrometry equipment and advanced data processing tools have made a ‘non-targeted analysis’ concept feasible to find known and unknown environmental pollutants.
A momentous drawback of the current applied targeted chemical analysis approaches used in national environmental monitoring programmes is the exclusive focus on a pre-defined list of compounds for detection. Hence, other chemical entities, potentially also present in the given sample, are not observed and their presence are unnoticed. Non-target analysis is chemical sample analysis without any prior knowledge about its chemical content. The idea is to cover as many chemicals as possible, without focusing on a predefined selection. We used continuous-lowlevel-aquatic-monitoring in-situ sampling procedures (CLAM) in combination with SPE (Appendix 1). This approach enabled in-situ filtering of more than 100 litres of water over several days onto a single SPE disk that was brought back to the laboratory for extraction and HRMS analysis. Grab samples from drinking water and groundwater sources were directly injected in the instrumental platforms and used as a comparison to the enriched CLAM samples. It has been shown that deployment of CLAM-samplers will achieve the retention of a broader range of trace organic compounds (e.g. caffeine, metolachlor, triclosan and chlorpyrifos), by using hydrophilic-lipophilic balanced SPE material, with lower reporting limits compared to direct/grab-sampling6,11 making this technique ideal for non-target analysis. The indicated lower concentration limits are effectively up to 100,000 times lower when enriched with CLAM-samples, as these samplers are shown capable of directly extracting >100 L of water easily eluted as 1 mL. Read Full Report…