GC/MS procedures for the determination of PCBs in environmental matrices

This paper describes GC/MS methods for the determination of PCBs in air, fish, sediment, soil, vegetation and water, all validated by analysis of appropriate standard reference materials. An important feature is the fact that up to 92 PCB congeners containing between three and seven chlorines are determined. The use of such a large number of individual congeners results in ΣPCB values that exceed those obtained using the smaller number of individual congeners routinely reported in some laboratories. Such underestimation of ΣPCB has important implications for the studies of the environmental fate of these compounds and may have led to an underestimation of their environmental persistence as an overall class.