Electrochemical determination of bentazone using simple screen-printed carbon electrodes

Bentazone is one of the most problematic pesticides polluting groundwater resources. It is on the list of pesticides that are mandatory to analyze at water work controls. The current pesticide measuring approach includes manual water sampling and time-consuming chromatographical quantification of the bentazone content at centralized laboratories. Here, we report the use of an electrochemical approach for analytical determination of bentazone that takes 10 s. The electrochemical electrodes were manually screen printed, resulting in the low-cost fabrication of the sensors. The current response was linearly proportional to the bentazone concentration with a R² ~ 0.999. We demonstrated a sensitivity of 0.0987 μA/μM and a limit of detection of 0.034 μM, which is below the U.S. Health Advisory level. Furthermore, the sensors have proved to be reusable and stable with a drop of only 2% after 15 times reuse. The sensors have been applied to successfully quantify bentazone spiked in real groundwater and lake water. The sensing method presented here is a step towards on-site application of electrochemical detection of pesticides in water sources.