Abstract
At present n‐hexane and methanol are the most used solvents for extracting organochlorine pesticide residues from environmental samples. One of the main problems is the very high cost of the gas chromatographic grade solvents when using the gas chromatographic method. To economize the cost of solvent, i.e. the analytical grade and commercial grade solvents of various trade marks were pretreated and analysed.
Several pretreatment conditions were studied. The most suitable solvent was found to be AR grade n‐hexane under the conditions: double distillation followed by molecular seive 13X treatment.