Multiresidue method for pesticides in drinking water using a graphitized carbon black cartridge extraction and liquid chromatographic analysis.

A general liquid-solid extraction procedure for the isolation of pesticides from groundwater and drinking water for high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is presented. This simple and rapid procedure involved passing a 2-L sample through a 250-mg graphitized carbon black (Carbopack B) cartridge at a flow rate of 150-160 mL/min. By taking advantage of the presence of positively charged active centers on the Carbopack B surface, a stepwise elution system allowed the complete separation of base-neutral pesticides from acidic ones. After partial solvent removal, the components in the two fractions were separated and quantified by gradient elution, reversed-phase HPLC with ultraviolet (UV) detection. The performance of the Carbopack cartridge was compared with that of a 500-mg C-18 bonded silica cartridge. With the Carbopack cartridge, the grand mean measurement accuracy of the 35 pesticides considered was 95%. With the C-18 cartridge, the grand mean measurement accuracy of the analytes was 76%. Compared to the C-18 cartridge, additional advantages of using a Carbopack cartridge are that the extraction procedure is about 7 times shorter, no pH adjustment of the environmental sample is necessary for trapping acidic compounds, and one cartridge instead of two suffices to extract base-neutral and acidic pesticides, making the Carbopack cartridge more adaptable than the C-18 one for field use. The detection limits by this method of all the pesticides considered were between 0.003 and 0.07 micrograms/L.