Determination of traces of copper and zinc in honeys by the solid phase extraction pre-concentration followed by the flame atomic absorption spectrometry detection

A simple and fast solid phase extraction procedure was developed to pre-concentrate traces of Cu and Zn prior to their determination in honey samples by flame atomic absorption spectrometry. The sample preparation included dissolution of honey samples and the passage (at 20 ml/min) of resulting 10% m/v solutions (100 ml) through Dowex 50W × 8-400 resin beds in order to quantitatively retain Cu and Zn and separate them from the glucose and fructose matrix. Enriched Cu and Zn traces were recovered with 5.0 ml of a 3.0 mol/l HCl solution and quantified by flame atomic absorption spectrometry. The procedure proposed was used to analyze sixty nine commercially available and freshly ripened honey samples coming from the Lower Silesia region (Poland). It enabled to measure Cu and Zn within the range of 0.01-1.42 and 0.03-15.38 μg/g, respectively, with precision better than 4%. Accuracy, assessed on the basis of the recovery test and the comparison of results with those obtained using wet digestion and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry, was ranged from -4% to +6%. Detection limits of Cu and Zn achieved with this method were 5 and 7 ng/g, respectively.