In the present study, a polyethylene Pasteur squeeze-type pipette was used as an extraction device in which USAEME was conducted with a low-density solvent, for the extraction and determination of OCPs in genuine water samples. The use of the widely
available pipettes meant that emulsification, centrifugation and the organic solvent collection procedures were conducted very conveniently. The results of optimization showed that salt addition, extraction time and emulsification temperature had no significant effects on the extraction. The independence of extraction efficiency
of these parameters afforded a more precise and robust method that was suitable for the analysis of the OCPs in complex matrices. Under the optimized working conditions, EFs of up to 328 were obtained and the LODs for all the analytes were of the order of ng/L with acceptable precision. The proposed method was an efficient, simple, rapid, sensitive, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly extraction method for OCPs that is an alternative to normal DLLME and USAEME methods that employ potentially toxic high-density organic solvents as extractants. However, the performance of the proposed method is possibly limited by the volume of the aqueous sample since the current Pasteur pipettes used are of limited (8 mL) capacities. Better performance could conceivably
be achieved, if larger size pipettes were available that would allow the extraction of bigger volumes of aqueous samples.