Direct analysis of six antibiotics in wastewater samples using rapid high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with diode array detector: a chemometric study towards green analytical chemistry.

In this work, a rapid HPLC-DAD method has been developed for the analysis of six antibiotics (amoxicillin, metronidazole, sulfamethoxazole, ofloxacine, sulfadiazine and sulfamerazine) in the sewage treatment plant influent and effluent samples. Decreasing the chromatographic run time to less than 4 min as well as lowering the cost per analysis, were achieved through direct injection of the samples into the HPLC system followed by chemometric analysis. The problem of the complete separation of the analytes from each other and/or from the matrix ingredients was resolved as a posteriori.