Oral · Pages 204–209
Abstract
Research summary supplied by the authors
It is a truth universally acknowledged that bisphenols are the essential building blocks for a whole category of tanning and retanning agents. Their unique characteristics allow to obtain full leather with high levels of softness, fastness and whiteness. In the last period, many attentions from different sectors, including leather one, were focused on bisphenol S (BPS) and bisphenol F (BPF) because of their potential adverse effects on human health, as well as bisphenol A (EFSA 2020; McDonough 2020). At the moment, no strong quantitative limits of BPS and BPF have been fi xed yet, neither effective standard analyses nor procedures have been recommended for the quantifi cation in chemicals and leather. In spite of this, low bisphenol products were studied and developed by chemicals manufacturer since the market demand has to be satisfi ed. In this work, a fast and non-conventional method for the quantifi cation of BPS and BPF is proposed for the study of low BPS and BPF phenolic and sulphonic syntans. The proposed method is based on chemometric calculations coupled with infrared spectroscopy (IR-S). Chemometrics is defi ned as “the discipline that uses mathematical and statistical methods, […] to provide maximum chemical information by analyzing chemical data” (Otto 2007). Since IR-S is a fi ngerprint technique, this alternative approach ensures to extract qualitative and quantitative information from spectral data (Brereton 2007). Thanks to this procedure, we developed a rapid, reliable and cheap analytical method, able to supply real time quantifi cation of phenol and bisphenols during the usual productive cycle.