Abstract: An effective high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method has been developed for the simultaneous determination of 9 ultraviolet stabilizers in food plastic packaging materials. The food packaging samples were firstly extracted by methanol-ethyl acetate, and then purified by a C18 solid-phase extraction (SPE) column. The target compounds were separated on a ZORBAX SB-C18 column (250 mm×4.6 mm, 5 μm) in gradient elution mode using methanol and water as mobile phases. The detection wavelength was at 310 nm. The linear plots of the nine ultraviolet stabilizers were obtained between 0.2 and 10 mg/L, with the correlation coefficients of above 0.999 for the nine ultraviolet stabilizers. The limits of detection for this method were in the range from 0.05 to 0.1 mg/L. The recoveries spiked in commercial food plastic packaging materials were in the range of 70.2%~89.0% with the relative standard deviations of 0.4%~4.5%. The results indicated that the method is simple, accurate, and suitable for the simultaneous determination of the nine ultraviolet stabilizers in food plastic packaging materials.

Key words: foods, plastic packaging materials, ultraviolet stabilizers, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)