Soils and Sediments


Industrial and household wastes need to be managed effectively to fulfil the challenges of the growing population, regulatory requirements, and aging facilities wastewater treatment in the world. Due to the complexity of the solid matrixes such as soils, sediments and suspended sediments, specific analytical methods are required to determine polar and nonpolar organic compounds which can affect water quality. Environmental sediment samples require extensive cleaning procedures (clean-up) to minimize the matrix effect and can be easily analysed in a production laboratory and however retain most of the compounds of interest. Due that most existing methods for the sediments analysis often use Soxhlet extraction, these required extraction steps for cleaning the solid sample have done imperative implement methods environmentally friendly and more efficient.

Our laboratories provide the possibility to perform selective and sensitive analysis to determine emerging contaminants in soil and sediments. Our laboratories applied analytical methods that use SPE as an alternative for the liquid-liquid extraction, those methods turn out to be more attractive because are fast, efficient, use much less solvent than the liquid-liquid extraction, and therefore are more affordable and produce less toxic wastes. This extraction technique combined with GC-MSD is used in our laboratory for extraction, separation, identification and quantification of these contaminants species in soil and sediment.