Discerning Emittable from Extractable Chemicals Identified in Consumer Products by Suspect Screening GCxGC-TOFMS

Characterization
of chemicals in household products is important
for understanding this potential source of chemical exposure. Increasingly,
suspect screening and nontargeted analysis techniques are used to
characterize as many chemical signatures as possible. Solids such
as household products are most conveniently prepared using solvent
extraction, revealing what chemicals are contained within the product
matrix but providing no information about the potential of those chemicals
to leave the matrix and cause actual exposure. In this work, the profile
and relative abundances of “extractable” chemical signatures
found after solvent extraction are compared to those “emittable”
to the headspace for 81 household products analyzed by two-dimensional
gas chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry. This study retrospectively
fuses data collected in separate efforts over 3.8 years and 13 analytical
batches. Management of the data is made possible by recent developments
in processing systems for complex data such as Highlight. Compounds
were generically classified as aromatic heteroatom, aromatic hydrocarbon,
glycol, hydrocarbon, long chain heteroatom, nonaromatic heteroatom,
and unknown/unclassified. Class-based retention time and abundance
trends were observed. Liquid extraction resulted in the greatest number
of features and the highest relative abundances, while low temperature
emission conditions produced the smallest number of features and lowest
relative abundances.