Evaluation of intercalated α-zirconium phosphate as sorbent in separation and detection of sulfonamides in honey

•Modified α-zirconium phosphate was used as sorbent.•A simple, mild surfactant-assisted synthetic route of sorbents was proposed.•We model four sulfonamides in honey whose conditions were optimised.•The sulfonamides eluted from the α-ZrP–CTMAB was analysed by LC–MS/MS.•We provide an analytical idea for antibacterial agents residues in complex matrix by α-ZrP. This paper presented a simple and effective solid-phase extraction method using α-zirconium phosphate intercalated by hexadecyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (α-ZrP–CTMAB) as a novel adsorbent. Surfactant-assisted method was applied to prepare α-ZrP–CTMAB whose sorbent properties and extraction efficiency were investigated. Four sulfonamides (SAs) in honey were selected as analytical models and finally determined by liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry. The recoveries of SAs at three spiked levels (10, 100, 1000ngg−1) were in the range of 58.7–99.3% and the relative standard deviations ranged from 2.69% to 7.48%. The detection limits obtained were 0.25–0.5ngg−1. Compared with other methods in the literatures, the proposed method reduced the consumption of organic solvents and simplified the sample preparation procedure for the analysis of SAs in honey. Therefore, modified α-ZrP showed great potential in the analysis of pollutants in complex samples.