In 2007, the European Union issued a regulation, 1906/2007/EC (REACH), requiring that, as of Jan. 1, 2010, all process oils isolated from the tires must contain less than 1.0 parts per million of benzo(a)pyrene, BaP, and the sum of eight specific polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons be less than 10 parts per million.
No method that would produce exactly such data was specified by this EU regulation. Instead, this EU regulation specified that the ISO 21461, a nuclear magnetic resonance method, be used to determine if a tire met the EU's standards on PAH contents. The EU regulation states that if the “Bay-H” NMR signal of the process oil isolated from the tire treads is
Southwest Research Institute developed a gas chromatography/mass spectrometry method that accurately and precisely determines BaP and the sum of the eight specified PAHs in process oils isolated from tires. We analyzed 50 car and truck tires using both the developed GC/MS method and the EU-specified ISO 21461 (NMR) method and assigned pass/fail for each tire using the data acquired by these two PAH methods.