Determination of phthalate esters in tea by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry

Abstract

A method was developed for the determination of five phthalate esters (PAEs) in tea. The phthalate esters were extracted from tea samples with an optimized extraction method and quantification was achieved by gas chromatography– mass spectrometry (GC–MS). The extraction parameters (i.e., extraction type, extraction solvent, extraction time, and amount of tea) and the conditions of detection were investigated and selected. Under the optimized conditions, the linearity of five PAEs were good in their detection range, the correlation coefficient of them were above 0.99. The limits of detection (LODs) were 0.24–3.72 μg/L. The spiked recovery varies from 87.63 to 98.08%, and the relative standard deviations (RSD) were less than 8% (n = 3). The proposed method was successfully applied to determine the five phthalate esters in commercial available tea samples, which suggested that the method was simple, less interference, and good repeatability.