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These authors contributed equally to the work as first author. Quantitative performance was excellent over several orders of magnitude. A rapid quantitative method for contaminants of emerging concern CECs in untreated wastewater enabled with direct injection liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry is presented. Evaluation of seven solid phase extraction sorbents showed no advantage for wastewater matrix removal. Excellent linearity, range, accuracy and precision was achieved for most compounds.
Application to untreated wastewater samples from three wastewater treatment works in the UK, USA and Mexico, enabled quantification of 56 compounds. This high-throughput method sets a new standard for the speedy and confident determination of over a hundred CECs in wastewater at the part-per-trillion level, as demonstrated by performing over injections per day.
Regarding environmental exposure to CECs, wastewater has been identified as a primary source of contamination in receiving waters and soils Munro et al. This has led to a large body of research focussing on their occurrence, fate and effects in biota and ecology Kinney et al.
However, for large numbers of compounds, triple quadrupoles can often be limited by a maximum number of simultaneous MRM transitions which, for hundreds of CECs, can be further constrained by the requirement for multiple transitions per compound for confirmation. This has been generally overcome by scheduling MRMs within defined retention time windows to maximise coverage as well as peak definition and sensitivity, but chromatographic efficiency and resolution also remains important.
