Salting-out-enhanced ionic liquid microextraction with a dual-role solvent for simultaneous determination of trace pollutants with a wide polarity range in aqueous samples

In real aquatic environments, many occupational pollutants with a wide range of polarities coexist at nanogram to milligram per liter levels. Most reported microextraction methods focus on extracting compounds with similar properties (e.g., polarity or specific functional groups). Herein, we developed a salting-out-enhanced ionic liquid microextraction based on a dual-role solvent (SILM-DS) for simultaneous detection of tetracycline, doxycycline, bisphenol A, triclosan, and methyltriclosan, with log K ow ranging from −1.32 to 5.40 in complex milk and environmental water matrices. The disperser in the ionic-liquid-based dispersive liquid–liquid microextraction was converted to the extraction solvent in the subsequent salting-out-assisted microextraction procedures, and thus a single solvent performed a dual role as both extractant and disperser in the SILM-DS process. Acetonitrile was selected as the dual-role solvent because of its strong affinity for both ionic liquids and water, as well as the extractant in the salting-out step. Optimized experimental conditions were 115 μL [C8MIM][PF6] as extractor, 1200 μL acetonitrile as dual-role solvent, pH 2.0, 5.0 min ultrasound extraction time, 3.0 g Na2SO4, and 3.0 min vortex extraction time. Under optimized conditions, the recoveries of the five pollutants ranged from 74.5 to 106.9%, and their LODs were 0.12–0.75 μg kg−1 in milk samples and 0.11–0.79 μg L−1 in environmental waters. Experimental precision based on relative standard deviation was 1.4–6.4% for intraday and 2.3–6.5% for interday analyses. Compared with previous methods, the prominent advantages of the newly developed method are simultaneous determination of pollutants with a wide range of polarities and a substantially reduced workload for ordinary environmental monitoring and food tests. Therefore, the new method has great application potential for simultaneous determination of trace pollutants with strongly contrasting polarities in several analytical fields.