LAUSR

ABSTRACT Recently, regulated phthalates do not have validated methods for testing, hence their presence cannot be estimated in the consumer products. So, a rapid, sensitive and reliable method was developed for the separation and quantitative analysis of all 28 regulated phthalate contents from the childcare items, toys and textile test specimens. Test specimens were extracted in tetrahydrofuran at 60°C and 60 min sonication and purified by centrifugation and filtration. Phthalate contents were separated on a DB-5MS column using helium gas as mobile phase under Sim/Scan mode. Pretreatment factors such as extraction solvent, extraction method, dilution ratio and extraction time were optimised. Under the optimised conditions, the targets had good linearity (r 2 ≥ 0.9995) in the range of 0.2–10.0 mg L−1. Recoveries were between 100 ± 15% for the target analytes. Limit of quantification was between 0.03 and 0.05 mg L−1. The developed analytical method has been successfully applied for extraction of regulated phthalates from real test specimens containing multiple types of matrices. Detected phthalates were in the range of 5.18–1798.14 mg L−1.