This review outlines the current situation and views the future analysis of hazardous chemicals in the environment by capillary electrophoresis (CE). A brief introduction of CE, the current state and problems concerning the analysis of hazardous chemicals in the environment are described for the first time. CE has a higher separation efficiency than that of LC, and a better suitability for the analysis of non-volatile or thermally degradable substances than with GC. Two modes of CE, capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) and electrokinetic chromatography (EKG), are mainly used for their analysis, EKC has more applications than CZE because of the separation ability of electrically neutral analytes. Examples of the optimization of hazardous chemical separation and determination in real samples by CE are given. Phenols and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PA-Hs) are mainly described, because there are relatively many applications of these chemicals. An isomeric separation of phenols was easily achieved by CE. Micellar EKG (MEKC) or the addition of cyclodextrin (CD) was effective for their separation. For PAHs, the addition of CD and/or organic solvents was investigated because of their hydrophobicity. Applications to other hazardous chemicals, such as dioxins, polychlorobiphenyls, nitro- and amino-aromatics, aromatic sulfonates, dyes and surfactants were described. Regarding an improvement of CE for environmental analysis, the techniques of sensitivity enhancement and the connections to mass spectrometry (MS) that have been developed to date are is discussed introduced. The combined use of off-line pre-concentration methods. Solid-phase extraction methods have been mainly used for environmental analysis. On-line concentration methods suitable for CE have been developed. Stacking or field-amplified injection has been used in both CZE and EKC. Sweeping can be used only in EKC and a higher concentration has been achieved for hydrophobic compounds. For sensitive detection, laser-induced fluorescence detection and electrochemical detection have frequently been applied to CE. The connection with MS is necessary to identify of unknown compounds. Although electrospray ionization has mainly been used for this connection, the applications of atmospheric pressure chemical ionization, ffit-fast atom bombardment ionization and electron ionization have been investigated because of a larger tolerance of the presence of salts and/or a higher ionization efficiency. Finally, the expectations of CE as a high-performance analytical method of hazardous chemicals in the future are briefly described.
