Environmental applications of solid-phase microextraction

Solid-phase microextraction is a well-established green solvent free extraction technique with a large number of applications in different fields such as food, forensic, biomedical, and the environment. The present review comprehensively describes the most recent applications mostly reported from 2013 of SPME for the extraction of environmental pollutants including persistent organic pollutants (POPs), pesticides, and emerging pollutants such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), in different environmental matrices. This review also covers the last technological developments including the use of novel extraction coatings (MOFs, CNTs, ILs), formats (e.g. TFSE), approaches (e.g. vacuum, cold fiber, and in-tube SPME), and on-site devices. The hyphenation of SPME with other techniques, especially mass spectrometry will be described, as well. The usefulness of SPME to follow (photo)degradation studies, both in target and non-target analysis, as well as to determine some of the physicochemical parameters governing the pollutant fate in the environment is also illustrated through different examples.