Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of manmade persistent organic chemicals manufactured for their heat, water, and stain-resistant properties. PFAS can be found ubiquitously in the environment because they are widely used in everyday consumer products such as non-sticky cookware, fast food wrapper, cosmetics, all stain-resistant products, aqueous fire-fighting foams, etc. As a result, PFAS are commonly detected in surface water and wastewater, which are the direct source of PFAS contamination in drinking water supplies and thus, a substantial source of human exposure. Some common PFAS are voluntarily phased out due to their potential toxicity, persistence, and ubiquitous presence in the environment. In many applications, they have been substituted by semi-volatile PFASs such as fluorotelomer alcohols (FTOH). These FTOH are PFAS precursors because they can bio-transform into persistent PFAS, such as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). Even though studies have been conducted nationwide to evaluate the degree of these PFAS precursors in the environment, research is lacking, especially in wastewater matrices. To fill the knowledge gap, we aim to investigate the occurrence, transport, and fate of PFAS precursors in wastewater. Furthermore, it is crucial to have a simple, fast, and reliable detection technique that can monitor the trace amount of PFAS in water. Therefore, in this study, we developed and validated a simple, low-cost, no clean-up, and sensitive method for the determination of PFAS and their precursors in water by applying 'green chemistry' based extraction, i.e., stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE) coupled with thermal desorption-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (TD-GC-MS) which provided good sensitivity and precision achieving low method limits of detection ranging from 2.16 ng/L to 16.73 ng/L and with an extraction recovery ranging 98% to 119%. We applied our developed method for the simultaneous determination of the four most common FTOH (4:2 FTOH, 6:2 FTOH, 8:2 FTOH, and 10:2 FTOH) in wastewater samples. We envision that our optimized SBSE-TD-GC-MS method will be a valuable alternative to investigate PFAS occurrence in water matrices.

Green analytical techniques for determination of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) precursors in water

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