Abstract:

An inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) method was developed and applied to determine
lead, cadmium, chromium, arsenic, mercury, antimony, zinc, germanium, nickel, selenium and barium released from plastic
food contact materials and articles. Samples were immersed in 4% acetic acid, and incubated for a specific time at a specific
temperature. After being added with gold stabilizer, the immersion solution was filtered through a 0.45 μm microporous
membrane, and then analyzed by ICP-MS. The quantification was performed by internal standard method. Under the
optimum conditions, the calibration curves were linear in the range of 0.1 to 100 μg/L with correlation coefficients (r) above
0.999. The method provided recoveries of 97.5%–106.2% at low, medium and high spiked concentrations with relative
standard deviation (RSD) in the range of 0.72% to 2.76%. The satisfied experimental results indicated that the proposed
method is simple, fast, reproducible, accurate and useful to determine eleven elements.

Key words: inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), element, release, plastic, food contact materials and articles