New method for determination of epichlorohydrin in epoxy-coated cans by oxolane derivatization and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry

A new method was developed for the determination of epichlorohydrin (ECH) in food contact surface of epoxy-coated cans. The oxolane derivative, which produced by reaction of epoxy moiety in ECH with cyclopentanone in the presence of borontrifluoride–diethyletherate, was analyzed by gas chromatography (GC)/mass spectrometry (MS). 1,2-Epoxyhexane was used as internal standard (IS), which produced an oxolane derivative under the same reaction mechanism as ECH. The developed method was validated with 1 ng ml−1 of limit of detection (LOD, surface area related 20 ng dm−2), >0.999 of linearity. Good precision, which was tested both in terms of intra-day repeatability and inter-day reproducibility, and 97.3–102.7% of good recoveries were obtained on three spiked levels of 5.2, 40.3 and 149.1 ng ml−1. The excellent validation data suggests that this method is more simple, quick and effective than the official method in European Committee for Standardization (CEN) to determine the residual amount of ECH in food contact materials for food law compliance test. The residual amount of ECH for 13 epoxy-coated can samples was analyzed, and none of the samples was found to be detectable levels of ECH in epoxy-coated cans.