Complete removal of a wide variety of organic pollutants from real-world samples has been demonstrated with only a few minutes of subcritical water extraction. Projects include fundamental solubility and mechanism studies, the development of subcritical water extraction as a replacement for hazardous and toxic solvents used for analytical extractions, and pilot-scale demonstrations of remediation applications. Conventional analytical methods for organic pollutants in water require extraction of the pollutants with hazardous solvents. The method can require as little as 30 minutes for sample preparation and analytical separations, is easily automated, and is ideally suited to use in the field. Although originally developed for the analysis of water samples, the EERC is now combining subcritical water extraction with SPME to allow a very rapid and organic solvent-free method for determining organic pollutants on soils and sludges.
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