Determination of Selected Volatiles in Cigarette Mainstream Smoke. The CORESTA 2009 Collaborative Study and Recommended Method

A recommended method has been developed and published by CORESTA, applicable to the quantification of selected volatiles (1,3-butadiene, isoprene, acrylonitrile, benzene, and toluene) in the gas phase of cigarette mainstream smoke. The method involved smoke collection in impinger traps and detection and measurement using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry techniques.

This report describes the final collaborative study applying the recommended method. It provides additional notes to inform other laboratories that might wish to adopt it, about some of the main features that need to be well controlled to provide data as robust and consistent as the data presented herein.

Data was provided by 15 industry-related and 4 independent laboratories and one governmental laboratory. Overall, 6 linear and 14 rotary smoking machines were used.

The joint experiments and collaborative work between the large number of participating laboratories has provided solutions to several methodological problems and reduced the high data variability that had initially been found particularly for 1,3-butadiene and acrylonitrile smoke yields.

Even so, the levels of reproducibility among laboratories are much greater than the levels found for ‘tar’, nicotine and carbon monoxide and given in the equivalent ISO standards. When expressing the reproducibility (R) value as a percentage of the mean yield among-laboratories and across all of the studied products, values ranged from 63-93% for 1,3-butadiene; from 36-62% for isoprene; from 41-110% for acrylonitrile; from 35-70% for benzene, and from 27-116% for toluene. For the higher ‘tar’ yielding products, the lower levels of variability were in line with those previously evaluated during Task Force work on standard methods for benzo[a]pyrene and tobacco specific nitrosamines. As expected, the lowest ‘tar’ yielding product gave the most variable data.