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SCREENING PROCESSED MILK FOR VOLATILE ORGANIC COMPOUNDS USING VACUUM DISTILLATION/GAS CHROMATOGRAPHY/MASS SPECTROMETRY
Citation:
Hiatt, M H. AND S Pia. SCREENING PROCESSED MILK FOR VOLATILE ORGANIC COMPOUNDS USING VACUUM DISTILLATION/GAS CHROMATOGRAPHY/MASS SPECTROMETRY. ARCHIVES OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINATION & TOXICOLOGY 46:189-196, (2004).
Impact/Purpose:
Provide state-of-the-science sampling, analysis, separation, and detection methods to allow rapid, accurate field and laboratory analyses of contaminated soils, sediments, biota, and groundwater to support Superfund clean-up decisions. Apply state-of-the-science methods in chemical analysis and data interpretation (e.g., mass spectral interpretation) to actual problems of OSWER, the Regions, and the States, in cooperation with the Las Vegas Technical Support Center as well as by direct contacts with Regional and State employees. Provide technical advice and guidance to OSWER using the environmental chemistry expertise (e.g., mass spectrometry, analytical methods development, clean-up methodology, inorganics, organometallics, volatile organics, non-volatile organics, semi-volatile organics, separation technologies, etc.) found within the branch.
Technical research support for various projects initiated either by Regions/Program Offices or ECB scientists. While these efforts will support the Regions and Program Offices, they cannot be predicted or planned in advance, and may serve multiple duty (e.g., solve real-world problems, serve to ground-truth analytical approaches that ECB is developing, transfer new technology). Many of the activities in this task support requests involving enforcement decisions and therefore are categorized as "environmental forensics".
Description:
An adaptation of Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response' Test Methods for Evaluating Solid Waste Physical/Chemical Methods (SW-846) method 8261 to analyze milk for an expanded list of volatile organic compounds is presented. The milk matriz exhibits a strong affinity for organic compounds and the surrogate based matriz normalization described in method 8261 provided accurate results. This method had the sensitivity necessary to detect volatile organic analytes at or below maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) set by EPA for drinking water. In a survey of milk samples available in Las Vegas, Nevada 32 of 88 targeted volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were detected. Many of the detected VOCs have not previously been reported and a rational for their presence in milk is presented.