Application: Pesticides

A wide range of instruments used for polymer analysis and their applications

Pesticides are the general name given to the chemicals used to protect crops from harmful organisms such as pests, diseases and weeds. The definition of pesticide and the framework for its production, import, sales, and use are strictly defined in the "Pesticide Regulation Act" in Japan. Because of its nature as chemicals used in open environments such as rice fields and fields, the testing and monitoring need to cover many different items. In addition, various other regulations are put into force by more than one relevant government office.

The targets of the pesticide analysis include monitoring of contamination against public water areas such as rivers, soil, drinking water, and a survey of residual volume in agricultural products. The regulation to comply with is different, depending on the analysis target. But what is in common is that they require analytical instruments that can detect many components at high sensitivity at once and that they require difficult analysis.

Analysis of pesticides in drinking water

Water quality control targets for pesticides in drinking water are set for each compound, and as of 2023, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has designated 115 target pesticides for water quality control in Japan.

As a testing method for pesticides in the water quality control target items, the simultaneous analysis method using solid-phase extraction-gas chromatography-mass spectrometer is notified in Methods 5 and 5-2 of the Attachment.

By convention, simultaneous analysis must be conducted for more than 100 pesticides at a time if the analysis includes pesticide compounds that have been monitored in the past.

Analysis of Residual Pesticides in Food

As for residual pesticides in food, feed additives and drugs for animals(pesticides), the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare put into force the Positive List System on May 29, 2006, to prohibit sales of food that contain more than a certain level of pesticides in Japan. Since its introduction, basically all pesticides have been the targets for testing, including pesticides whose residual standards in food were not set individually by the Food Sanitation Act and the mandate standard (0.01ppm) will be applied.

It is necessary for the analysis of residual pesticides in food to measure extreme trace amounts of more than hundreds of components of the target pesticides that exist at once that scarcely exist in a sample solution where various matrices exist. Therefore, an extremely high performance is required for instruments for analysis.