Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) analysis has become crucial due to their omnipresence from plentiful sources, their persistence, and their potential health risks. Accurate determination of the sources and potential exposure from PFAS would require available standards for all produced PFAS as well as their precursors and degradation products.
Additionally, for many substances there is no information about their structure, partially due to many precursors and unknown intermediate products, and partially because they are patented by the companies that produce them.
As of today, numerous techniques have been either developed or modified for the analysis of PFAS, but these methods exhibit significant variations in their capacity to provide specific information.
We analyzed paper material consisting of fresh fiber and secondary materials intended to produce food packaging for the presence of PFAS. The samples were extracted and analyzed for 23 different PFAS substances using the targeted approach with LC tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). This analytical technique detects specific, easily ionizable PFAS with high sensitivity. However, one drawback of this approach is that it allows the identification of less than 1% of the PFAS known today. For this reason, we used combustion ion chromatography (CIC) to determine the content of extractable organic fluorine compounds (EOF) and compare it to the total fluorine content.
