Method comparison for analyzing formaldehyde in marker pen ink

Abstract

Marker pens belong to school things that are controlled by the regulation system called safety confirmation under special act on the safety of products for children with the formaldehyde criteria of 20 mg/ kg. With nine marker pens available commercially, formaldehyde in marker pen ink was analyzed by present test standard where marking on a fabric swatch with a pen and extracting the swatch in water and derivatization with Nash reagent followed by UV/Vis spectrophotometeric measurement (Nash-UV/Vis method), giving not detected results or a false positive result in case of a colored water extract. However, the contents of formaldehyde in ink of nine marker pens were determinded to range between 3.2 ~ 93.2 mg/kg with three results above the safety criteria of 20 mg/kg by HPLC/DAD measurements on DNPH derivatives of formaldehyde (DNPH-HPLC/ DAD method) in ink dissolved directly in water using an ultrasonic bath. Therefore, the DNPH-HPLC/DAD method with the extraction of ultrasonic dissolving ink in water is proposed as a proper method for analyzing formaldehyde in ink. The proposed method has advantages of lower detection limit and accuracy with colored extracts as well as a simple and fast extraction. The accuracy and precision of this method was estimated to be 90.1 ~ 105.4 % and 0.6 ~ 3.3 %, respectively by spiking tests in the ranges of 20 mg/kg and 40 mg/kg using matrixes such as highlighter pen ink, board marker ink, chalk marker pen ink and painter marker ink.