Nicotine is considered a so-called ‘emerging lifestyle contaminant’. Elefteria Psillakis at the Technical University of Crete, Greece, used HiSorb™ sample probes to improve the sensitivity of her extraction technique to enable the detection of low levels of nicotine among 4000 compounds.
Nicotine has been widely detected in water and wastewater. A significant source of nicotine contamination in natural waters is leachates from discarded cigarettes – the most littered items in urban areas and along coastlines. Elefteria Psillakis, professor of water chemistry at the Technical University of Crete, Greece, and her team have embarked on a new and upcoming area of research – investigating nicotine’s fate in the environment. The project was funded by Philip Morris Products SA (Investigator-Initiated Study award) and the results were published in a peer-reviewed environmental chemistry journal.1
Their recent investigation involved analysing the photodegradation of nicotine in water leachates from conventional cigarette butts and ‘heat-notburn’ cigarettes (the new generation of tobacco products with a fastexpanding market). For this, the team used high-capacity sorptive extraction followed by thermal desorption–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (TD–GC–MS).
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