DEVELOPMENT OF A GCMS PROCEDURE FOR IDENTIFICATION OF ORGANIC SUBSTANCES IN MATERIALS TESTING LEACHATES Final Report to the Drinking Water Inspectorate
Report No DWI0378

February 1

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Two protocols have been drafted, in BSi format, for the conduct of leaching tests to produce leachates from materials intended for use in contact with drinking water, and for the analysis of these leachates for unspecified organic substances using GCMS. This latter protocol was based on the use of a suite of various types of deuterium-labelled compounds to ensure that the methodology utilised was appropriate to allow the requirements of the protocol to be met.

A within-laboratory performance test of these protocols was undertaken using three materials agreed with the Department. These materials were polyethylene pipe, glass-reinforced polyester (GRP) pipe and bitumen-lined ductile iron pipe. This test demonstrated that, with minimal amendment, the required performance (in terms of limit of detection and relative standard deviations for detected compounds) could be met. The only amendment required was dechlorination of the leachate samples prior to analysis, as it became clear that antioxidants leached from materials could be oxidised by residual free chlorine in the leachates obtained using chlorinated water.

Four laboratories were involved in the subsequent interlaboratory performance testing of the protocols. These were WRc, The Water Quality Centre (Thames Water), KIWA (The Netherlands) and Centre de Recherche et de Controle des Eaux, Paris (CRECEP) (France). This testing showed that comparable results to those from the initial within laboratory testing could be obtained. Various criteria, such as the recoveries of the internal standards, the quality of the procedural blanks, the consistency of the ratios of the peak areas of the compounds detected and the internal standards, and the consistency of the mass spectra obtained were used to evaluate the performance of the protocols.

The protocols produced are therefore satisfactory, in that they allow organic compounds in leachates from materials intended for use in contact with drinking water to be reliably determined at concentrations in the range 1-10 µg/l. The limit of detection is about 0.75 µg/l .

Copies of this report may be available as an Acrobat pdf download under the 'Find Completed Research' heading on the DWI website.