The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water (OGWDW) through the Office of Water (OW) is responsible for protecting the nation’s drinking water from known and emerging contaminants. Historically, OGWDW has used the Drinking Water Contaminant Candidate List (CCL) of microbes and chemicals to identify chemicals that might require future regulation for the protection of drinking water. The CCL is a list of contaminants that are not currently subject to any proposed promulgated national primary drinking water regulations, but are known or anticipated to occur in public water systems. One of the key pieces of information that must be available in order to make a regulatory determination is nationwide occurrence data for the contaminants under consideration. Historically, OGWDW has collected the necessary occurrence data under its Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Regulations (UCMR). Thus, standardized methods that will produce data of sufficient quality for UCMR monitoring of contaminants on CCL 4 are needed. CCL 4, published in November of 2016, has identified nonylphenol as a contaminant of interest to OW. Nonylphenol is mainly used to produce nonylphenol ethoxylates which are important non-ionic surfactants. The demand for nonylphenol ethoxylates in the U.S. and Canada is between 300-400 million pounds per year. These surfactants are used in detergents, paints, pesticides, personal care products and plastics. Nonylphenol is prevalent in the environment and has a potential role as an endocrine disrupting compound. A rugged solid phase extraction (SPE)-LC/MSMS method is being developed for nonylphenol that adequately addresses issues specific to analyzing compounds in drinking water, such as preservatives, internal and surrogate standards, and aqueous sample and extract holding times. Samples were preserved with sodium bisulfate to inhibit microbial growth and ascorbic acid for dechlorination. An average recovery of 98.6% with an RSD of 2.8% for nonylphenol in 250 mL of preserved deionized water has been obtained using C18 SPE cartridges. Precision and accuracy data in surface water and ground water will be presented, as well as recommendations for reducing nonylphenol contamination of samples from common laboratory supplies.

Development of a U.S. EPA method for the analysis of nonylphenol in drinking water by solid phase extraction and LC/MS/MS

255th National Meeting (2018)

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