Have you ever spent the day walking through the woods, paused to take in the natural sights, smells and sounds of a babbling brook or flowing waterfall and thought….“I wonder how many pesticides are in that water?”
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If you’re familiar with methylene chloride (which I’m sure you are since it’s one of the most widely used laboratory solvents), you know that it’s developed a reputation for being one of the “bad boys” of the solvent world. The bad press has certainly been earned. It’s been attributed to over 60 deaths in the last 4 decades. It’s also pretty aggressive – exposure to just a few ounces for a few minutes can be enough to cause severe damage or death. And since it’s a colorless liquid, an innocent-looking spill could be a severely harmful hazard.
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Have you ever stopped to enjoy a bright, vibrant sunset, only to have that really annoying friend interrupt your thoughts with a comment like “you know you’re just looking at all the pollution in the air, right?”
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“Our laboratory uses organic solvents every day. Should we be concerned about solvent exposure?” I hear this question fairly often and the short and simple answer is: YES. But if this were a simple yes/no question, I wouldn’t have anything else to say, and this would be the shortest blog post that’s ever been written.
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Liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), supported liquid extraction (SLE), and solid-phase extraction (SPE) have existed for decades and if you’re doing organic sample preparation, you’re probably quite familiar with at least one of these techniques. But are you familiar with all of them? How are they similar? How are they different? Let’s review!
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Solid phase extraction (SPE) is a powerful sample preparation tool that makes it possible to extract semi-volatile organic compounds with varying physical and chemical properties. When used properly, this tool will simultaneously extract hundreds of analytes from the most challenging sample matrices. When used improperly – well, this tool can quickly become as effective as using a hammer to paint the walls in your house.
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There’s nothing more satisfying than successfully extracting a really challenging sample. Solid phase extraction (SPE) is a powerful technique for extracting semi-volatile organic compounds and hexane-extractable materials (HEMs). When the chemistry is tailored to meet the requirements of the application, literally hundreds of compounds can be extracted with a single pass of solution through an SPE disk.
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On the surface, EPA Method 1664B seems pretty straightforward – use n-hexane to extract compounds (commonly referred to as “oil and grease”) from an acidified water sample. Evaporate the hexane from the extract, weigh the residue that gets left behind, and report that weight in terms of a concentration (often as mg/L of HEM).
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If you’re a laboratory that’s processing drinking water samples using solid phase extraction, you’ve inevitably gotten to the step in your procedure where you’ve eluted your analytes from your SPE media and you find yourself saying “How do I dry my extracts?”
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Solid phase extraction is a powerful technique – it can be used to clean up the most challenging samples, and extract and preconcentrate hundreds of semivolatile organic compounds.
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