Olive mill wastewaters: quantitation of the phenolic content and profiling of elenolic acid derivatives using HPLC-DAD and HPLC/MS

Olive mill wastewaters (OMWs) are important by-products of olive oil production. The wide availability and the forbidding economic costs of OMWs disposal have generated interest in their possible exploitation as a sustainable source of polyphenols. The development and optimisation of improved analytical methods for the detailed characterisation of polyphenol molecular profiles after production and during storage conditions are thus required. A new analytical method based on reverse-phase HPLC separation of polyphenols in OMWs on an embedded-polar group (EPG) stationary phase is proposed as an alternative to conventional C18 columns. The procedure was used for the quantitation of 11 polyphenols, using diode-array detection (DAD), and achieving quantitation limits equal to or lower than 0.1 µg g