Evaluating the agricultural impact of zineb fungicide through spectrophotometric technique and its applications

ABSTRACT

A spectrophotometric method has been developed based on the reaction of the zineb with chloranil. The proposed spectrophotometric method has been applied to the determination of zineb in commercial formulation, grains, fruits, vegetables, and spiked water samples, resulting in high recoveries indicating good accuracy and precision of the method employed. The method has also been validated to study the adsorption of zineb on three Indian soils by using the batch-equilibrium technique. The reaction between zineb and chloranil yielded a yellow-coloured product in the solution and was extracted using acrylonitrile which showed maximum absorbance at 415 nm. The relationship between the absorbance and concentration of the fungicide has been established and found to be linear in the range of 1.10–15.45 μgmL⁻¹. The recoveries of the zineb were in the range 95.73%–98.96% with relative standard deviation (RSD) in the ranges 0.69%–1.05%, thus showing good accuracy and precision of the method. The leaching potential has been evaluated from adsorption data in terms of Ground Water Ubiquity Score (GUS) and the values obtained in the range 1.34–1.40 which are less than the standard value, i.e. 1.8, classifying it as a non-leacher fungicide.

KEYWORDS:

• Zineb
• spectrophotometry
• residue analysis
• adsorption studies

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Department of Chemistry, Himachal Pradesh University Shimla-05 for providing lab facilities to conduct this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary materials.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03067319.2024.2370394.