An affordable method for the simultaneous determination of the most studied pharmaceutical compounds as wastewater and surface water pollutants

There is still an increasing need of knowledge about the presence of pharmaceuticals in the environment in many countries. To contribute to the improvement of this knowledge it should be useful to get not only more reliable methods, but also analytical methods that do not require expensive equipment and, consequently, could be used even in the less developed areas. In the present work, a novel analytical method for the simultaneous determination of several priority pharmaceuticals, as aquatic media pollutants, in wastewater and surface water is reported. The method involves sample treatment by SPE, followed by LC with diode array and fluorescence detection. Parameters that affect the efficiency of the SPE step such as elution solvents, sample pH and cartridge sorbents were evaluated and optimized. The best results were obtained using acetone as elution solvent, acidifying samples to pH 2 and employing Oasis HLB as SPE sorbent. Recoveries of the pharmaceuticals from influent and effluent wastewater and surface water samples were in the range from 61.4 to 123%. LODs were in the range of 0.001–0.323 μg/L and LOQs were between 0.020 and 1.078 μg/L.