Development, Validation and Application of a Method for Routine Analysis of Chlorinated Paraffins in Food and Human Milk

Chlorinated paraffins (CPs) are high production volume industrial chemicals. Their high complexity with thousands of individual compounds that are virtually inseparable by chromatographic methods has led to a number of challenges for analysis and risk assessment.
During the course of this doctoral thesis, a new method for analysis of short-chain CPs (SCCPs) and medium-chain CPs (MCCPs) was developed, validated and used to collect occurrence data based on more than 400 food samples.
National pooled human milk samples from 53 countries, collected as part of two sampling campaigns organised by the United Nations Environment Programme, were additionally analysed to illustrate the global background contamination for this barely regulated group of contaminants.