When analyzing environmental samples for organic micropollutants, mass spectrometry is most often used. Mass spectrometry utilizes the fact that all substances have a specific weight. This weight is used to distinguish between different substances. Most commercial laboratories use quadrupoles for this analysis. Quadrupoles work by searching for one mass/substance at a time. They can search for multiple substances in the same sample, but have the limitation that they can only search for one substance at a given time and that they only search for the substances you are looking for.

Table over substances

Here you can find the table of the substances for which detection limits of ≤0.1 µg L-1 have been found by the method used.