Sensitive determination of phenols in environmental water samples with SPE packed with bamboo carbon prior to HPLC.

Bamboo carbon, an inexpensive, readily available material, has attracted great attention in recent years because of adsorptive properties. In this paper, the potential of bamboo carbon as a SPE adsorbent for the determination of phenols, was investigated. Phenols are important environmental contaminants that may adversely affect human health. Parameters influencing extraction efficiency, including type of eluent, eluent volume, amount of adsorbent, as well as sample pH, volume, and flow rate were investigated and optimized. The optimized results exhibited excellent linear relationships between peak area and phenol concentrations over the range of 2.0-100 ng/mL, with precision between 2.2-7.2%. The LODs were 0.06-0.4 ng/mL for the eight phenols tested. The proposed method has been successfully applied to the analysis of several real-world environmental water samples. These results indicate that bamboo carbon may be used as a novel SPE adsorbent for the concentration and determination of phenols in real environmental water samples.