ANALYSIS OF DRINKING-WATER FOR TRACE ORGANICS

The protection of drinking water quality is one of the most important mandates of government environment departments. During the past 2 deca des, more and more attention has been spent on the trace organic chemi cal pollutants that may be present in potable water. Consequently, the detection, identification, and quantitation of trace organics in drin king water has been the subject of considerable analytical development work. Sophisticated methods based on gas chromatography-mass spectrom etry (GC-MS) are now in routine use that can detect organics at parts per trillion concentrations. For some analytes, parts per quadrillion detection limits have been reported. Although these capabilities are l argely due to the maturity of GC-MS as an analytical technique, recent developments in solid-phase extraction (SPE) and other reduced-solven t or even solvent-free extraction and concentration methods are leadin g the way to even greater analytical performance. Other methods based on liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) may lead to concern over many other analytes not determined by GC-MS. The above and relat ed techniques are reviewed to demonstrate the state of current analyti cal methods for the determination of trace organics in drinking water samples, and to discuss future developments. Throughout the 1980s, dev elopment of GC-MS instrumentation and chromatographic procedures were paramount, but attention has now shifted to improving sample preparati on methods. Eventually, the development of fully automated methods fro m sampling to report generation will be realized.