Determination of Haloacetic Acids in Bottled and Tap Water Sources by Dispersive Liquid-Liquid Microextraction and GC-MS Analysis

Haloacetic acids are toxic organic pollutants that can be formed as by-products of disinfection of water by chlorination. In this study, we developed a fast and efficient method for the determination of six species of these compounds in water using dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction followed by GC-MS analysis. To be suitable for GC analysis, the acidic analytes were derivatized using n-octanol. One-factor-at-a-time optimization was carried out on several factors including temperature, extraction time, amount of catalyst, and dispersive solvent. The optimized conditions were then used to determine calibration parameters. Linearity, as demonstrated by coefficient of determination, ranged between 0.9900 and 0.9966 for the concentration range of 0.05-0.57 μg/L. The proposed method has good repeatability; intraday precision was calculated as %RSD of 2.38-9.34%, while interday precision was 4.69-8.06%. The method was applied to real samples in bottled water and tap water sources. Results indicated that the total concentrations of the analytes in these sources (2.97-5.30 μg/L) were far below the maximum contaminant levels set by both the World Health Organization and the United States Environmental Protection Agency. The proposed method compared favorably with methods reported in the literature.