Automated thermal desorption-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry for screening of hazardous chemicals in cotton and cotton blend garments-analytical challenges.

The global production of textiles involves large amounts of health-hazardous chemicals, constituting possible health risks since residues usually remain in the finished garments. In the present study, a recently published ATD-GC/MS methodology for screening synthetic textiles is further extended to cotton and cotton blend materials. Different textile materials with a high content of cotton were found to exhibit large variations in adsorption strength for a number of chemicals frequently detected in textiles. This was shown to strongly influence the thermal desorption efficiency in ATD-GC/MS. By using absolute response factors from appropriate internal standards spiked directly onto the textile samples, the effects from these differences could be minimized. In this way, accurate quantification was made possible regardless of textile composition, and quantification of native textile chemicals in garments made with the ATD-GC/MS method agreed well with an offline method based on solvent extraction and GC/MS analysis. The ATD-GC/MS method has now been shown to be applicable for quantitative screening of at least 75% of all the clothing textiles on the retail market. The simplified quantification method makes it suitable for screening large numbers of samples. For all fiber materials investigated, the method limit of detection, using only 20 mg of textile, is at least 100 times lower than the current EU regulation for quinoline and a number of toxic arylamines.