Detection and quantification of chlordecone in contaminated soils from the French West Indies by GC-MS using the 13C10-chlordecone stable isotope as a tracer

Abstract

Chlordecone is an organochlorine insecticide that has been widely used to control banana weevil in the French West Indies. As a result of this intense use, up to 20,000 ha are contaminated by this insecticide in the French West Indies, and this causes environmental damage and health problems. A scenario of exposure was drawn by French authorities, based on land usage records. Many efforts have been made to monitor the occurrence of chlordecone and its main metabolites using different analytical methods, including GC, GC/MS, LC/MS, and NIRS. Although these different methods allow for the detection and quantification of chlordecone from soils, none of them estimate the bottleneck caused by extraction of this organochlorine from soils with high adsorption ability. In this study, we used (13)C10-chlordecone as a tracer to estimate chlordecone extraction yield and to quantify chlordecone in soil extracts based on the (13)C/(12)C isotope dilution. We report the optimization of (13)C10-chlordecone extraction from an Andosol. The method was found to be linear from 0.118 to 43 mg kg(-1) in the Andosol, with an instrumental detection limit estimated at 8.84 μg kg(-1). This method showed that chlordecone ranged from 35.4 down to 0.18 mg kg(-1) in Andosol, Nitisol, Ferralsol, and Fluvisol soil types. Traces of the metabolite β-monohydrochlordecone were detected in the Andosol, Nitisol, and Ferralsol soil samples. This last result indicates that this method could be useful to monitor the fate of chlordecone in soils of the French West Indies.

Natural transformation of chlordecone into 5b-hydrochlordecone in French West Indies soils: statistical evidence for investigating long-term persistence of organic pollutants

“…This maybe explains why further dechlorination products have not been detected, so far, in these soils, due to the expected resulting very low concentrations. For instance, contrarily to what occurred with US soils, no traces of dihydroCLD were found in Guadeloupean soils having 5b-hydroCLD/CLD ratios-7.1 to 18.33‰-in the range of those observed in Martinique (Borsetti and Roach 1978;Martin-Laurent et al 2014). The 5b-hydroCLD may therefore be just the tip of the iceberg.…”

“…5b-Hydrochlordecone 4 (5b-hydroCLD), whose structure is identical to CLD except that one chlorine atom is replaced by a hydrogen at position 5b (Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) numbering) and which is commercially available as an analytical standard, has been searched for and often detected in environmental matrices (soil, surface water and groundwater, sediments, plants, avian tissues and eggs, crustaceans, molluscs and fishes) from the geographical areas where CLD was applied (FWI) or unintentionally released during its manufacture (USA) (Borsetti and Roach 1978;Harless et al 1978;Stafford et al 1978;Carver and Griffith 1979;Orndorff and Colwell 1980;Coat et al 2011;Martin-Laurent et al 2014;Clostre et al 2014a, b). The current tacit assumption is that the presence of this compound is not the result of a biotic or abiotic dechlorination of CLD in these matrices but rather the consequence of its presence as an impurity, a by-product of its preparation, in the CLD released in the environment (Borsetti and Roach 1978;Cabidoche et al 2009;Coat et al 2011;Martin-Laurent et al 2014).…”

“…The current tacit assumption is that the presence of this compound is not the result of a biotic or abiotic dechlorination of CLD in these matrices but rather the consequence of its presence as an impurity, a by-product of its preparation, in the CLD released in the environment (Borsetti and Roach 1978;Cabidoche et al 2009;Coat et al 2011;Martin-Laurent et al 2014). Until now, however, this assumption could not be verified since no detailed chemical analyses of the CLD commercial formulations (and so of their 5b-hydroCLD content) seem to exist in the literature.…”

Solid-phase microextraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry for quantitative determination of chlordecone in water, plant and soil samples

“…The chlordecone extraction methods require solvent manipulations in order to be as exhaustive as possible and may be time-consuming. Usually, liquid-liquid extraction and solvent extraction (cold [15][16][17], hot [18] or hot and under high pressure [19,20]) are, respectively, done for aqueous samples, and solid plant and soil samples. Detection can be done with different very sensitive techniques and quantitation methods are based on calibration curves of chlordecone in solvent and spiked samples: GC-MS, GC-MS/ MS, GC-ECD or LC-MS and LC-MS/MS analysis.…”

“…Detection can be done with different very sensitive techniques and quantitation methods are based on calibration curves of chlordecone in solvent and spiked samples: GC-MS, GC-MS/ MS, GC-ECD or LC-MS and LC-MS/MS analysis. A relatively poor recovery (80%) of chlordecone compared with other pesticides was reported for soil samples [20,21]. The French standard method for measuring inorganic and organic micropollutants NF XP P 41-250-1, 2, 3 [22] is also based on chlordecone solvent extraction.…”