Honey is part and parcel of our daily nutrition, but in recent times it has been reported to be tainted by the presence of polar substituted phenols purported from the use of pesticides, herbicides, antimicrobial agents, etc. Honey's viscous nature and matrix complexity often result in analytical chemists resorting to derivatization for the detection of polar analytes such as substituted phenols. This study aims to overcome the matrix effect without derivatization and offer a more sustainable solution with notable sensitivity and selectivity using dispersive membrane microextraction alongside high-performance liquid chromatography (DMME-HPLC) with sporopollenin-methylimidazolium-based mixed matrix membrane (Sp-MIM-MMM). The DMME-HPLC approach successfully determined the presence of mono- and disubstituted phenols from unspiked honey samples with concentrations ranging from 7.8 to 154.7 ng/mL. The sustainability of the proposed method was also validated using the Analytical Eco-Scale (AES) and the Analytical GREEnness Metric (AGREE) where an excellent score of 94 and the encouraging score of 0.72 were recorded, respectively.
Keywords: Analytical Eco-Scale; Analytical GREEnness Metric; dispersive membrane microextraction; honey; mixed matrix membrane.