Incorporating spent coffee grounds into single-use drinking straws for enhanced biodegradability also raises safety concerns due to increased chemical complexity. Here, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) present in coffee ground straws (CGS), polylactic acid straws (PLAS), and polypropylene straws (PPS) were characterized using headspace - solid-phase microextraction and migration assays, by which 430 and 153 VOCs of 10 chemical categories were identified by gas chromatography - mass spectrometry, respectively. Further, the VOCs were assessed for potential genetic toxicity by quantitative structure-activity relationship profiling and estimated daily intake (EDI) calculation, revealing that the VOCs identified in the CGS generally triggered the most structural alerts of genetic toxicity, and the EDIs of 37.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRationale: Chlorinated aromatics and alkanes are widely used for their flame retardancy, but they need to be monitored when used in recycled pulp. This paper reports the use of palladium acetate/activated carbon (Pa/Ac) activated by nitric acid as an online catalyst to determine chlorinated aromatics and chlorinated alkanes in recycled paper products using gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS), which significantly improves the sensitivity of the method and remarkably lowers the detection limits.
Methods: The Pa/Ac catalyst was prepared using a self-made catalytic device and used as key to the online catalytic conversion of target chlorinated aromatic hydrocarbons and chlorinated alkanes for GC-MS/MS analysis.
Bath-type ultrasonic-assisted extraction (UAE) has been developed as one of the most important sample pretreatment methods, especially for batch-sample pretreatment. So far, however, requirements for the performance of bath-type UAE equipment have not been standardized, nor has a suitable evaluation method that can be used to judge the feasibility of ultrasonic equipment for extraction been presented in the available regulations or standards. A simple and efficient method that can be used to evaluate the performance of bath-type UAE equipment is necessary to be proposed and established.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlkylphenol polyethoxylates (APEO), surfactants used in the production of textiles, have the potential to move from the fabric to the skin of the person wearing the clothes, posing an inherent risk of adverse health consequences. Therefore, the textile industry needs a fast, robust method for determining aqueous extractable APEO in fabrics. The currently-favored HPLC methods are limited by the presence of a mixture of analytes (due to the molecular weight distribution) and a lack of analytical standards for quantifying results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF© LitMetric 2025. All rights reserved.