Elsevier

Environmental Pollution

Volume 144, Issue 2, November 2006, Pages 393-405
Environmental Pollution

Passive air sampler as a tool for long-term air pollution monitoring: Part 1. Performance assessment for seasonal and spatial variations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2005.12.048Get rights and content

Abstract

The potential of passive air sampling devices (polyurethane foam disks) to assess the influence of local sources on the quality of the surrounding environment was investigated. DEZA Valasske Mezirici, a coal tar and mixed tar oils processing plant, and Spolana Neratovice, a chemical factory with the history of high production of organochlorinated pesticides (OCPs), were selected as the point sources of PAHs, and OCPs, respectively. Levels of PCBs, OCPs and PAHs were determined for all sampling sites and sampling periods. The study brought useful data about the air concentrations of POPs in the investigated regions. More important, it provided information on the transport and fate of POPs in the vicinity of local sources of contamination useful for the estimation of their influence. Very good capability of passive samplers to reflect temporal and spatial fluctuation in concentrations of persistent organic pollutants in the ambient air was confirmed which makes them applicable for monitoring on the local scale.

Introduction

As the air pollution is an issue of great public health concern, new methods for air quality monitoring have been developed in recent years (Tremolada et al., 1996, Shahir et al., 1999, Peters et al., 2000, Wennrich et al., 2002, Harner et al., 2003). Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) due to their wide distribution, ability to bioaccumulate in the fatty tissues, and carcinogen, mutagen and endocrine disruption potentials, remain the center of our attention. They are emitted from various primary and secondary sources, and the atmosphere often plays a key role in their transport within the immediate vicinity of POPs sources as well as over great distances (Wania, 2003). Atmospheric transport is also the main route for delivery of POPs to the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems (Hermanson et al., 1991, Harner et al., 1995, Simcik et al., 1996, Hafner and Hites, 2003). Current research on the global fate of POPs seeks new information on the sources of POPs (Hafner and Hites, 2003), but also on other factors controlling air concentrations, as the climate (Simcik et al., 1999, Ma et al., 2004), air-surface exchange or atmospheric transport influence greatly the spatial, and temporal variability of atmospheric POPs concentrations (Hillery et al., 1997, Cousins and Jones, 1998, Bidleman, 1999). From this point of view, frequent measurements of air concentrations in different locations as well as monitoring studies on various levels from around the local point sources up to the continental scale are a matter of a great importance.

The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants was adopted in May 2001 with the objective of protecting human health and the environment from persistent organic pollutants and came into force in May 2004 (UNEP Stockholm Convention, 2001). It describes the problems of research, development and monitoring including data interpretation and evaluation as well as necessary effectiveness evaluation of Convention measures. Parties to the Stockholm Convention are required to develop National Implementation Plans to demonstrate how the obligations of the Convention will be implemented and therefore they will need the establishment of arrangements to provide themselves with comparable monitoring data on the presence of the chemicals listed in the Annexes and their regional and global environmental transport. Although a number of regional and global monitoring programs have been established to report on the presence of POPs in the environment, there is very little previous experience of POPs monitoring designed to help evaluate the effectiveness of a legally binding international agreement. Moreover, the establishment of an appropriate monitoring capacity in areas where it does not exist yet will take several years to become operational. Passive air sampling as a cheap and versatile alternative to the conventional high volume air sampling is one of the methods currently considered as suitable for the purpose of such monitoring programs.

All these demands resulted in the development of a range of different passive air samplers (Bartkow et al., 2004a). These devices are capable of being deployed in many locations at the same time, which offers a new option for large scale monitoring projects. As it provides information about long-term contamination of the selected site, passive air sampling can be used as a screening method for semi-quantitative comparison of different sites contamination with the advantage of low sensitivity to accidental short-time changes in concentration of pollutants. Since the sampling rates and the relationship between the amount of POPs sequestered by the sampling devices and their concentrations in the sampled air have not been fully mathematically described yet, the interpretation of results is rather difficult and usually based on the field measurements (Peters et al., 2000, Bartkow et al., 2004b). Air concentration estimations are enabled either by calibration based on parallel active and passive samplings or an employment of the permeation reference compounds (Ockenden et al., 2001, Soderstrom and Bergqvist, 2004).

Most of the passive air sampling measurements have been performed using semi-permeable membrane devices (SPMDs) (Petty et al., 1993, Ockenden et al., 1998a, Meijer et al., 2003, Bartkow et al., 2004a, Jaward et al., 2004c), polyurethane foam disks (PUFs) (Wilford et al., 2004) and XAD resins (Wania et al., 2003) which can be exposed over the period of several weeks or months. They sample the variety of POPs at a similar rate of a few m3 of air per day. However, rapidly equilibrating samplers were developed also to sample low air volumes (Harner et al., 2003), and attempts have been made to do an intercalibration of different kinds of passive samplers (Peters et al., 2000, Shoeib and Harner, 2002) in order to be able to compare the data. The ability of passive samplers to obtain data from the local (Lohmann et al., 2001) to the continental scale (Jaward et al., 2004a, Jaward et al., 2004b) and to conduct urban–rural (Harner et al., 2004) and latitudinal transects (Ockenden et al., 1998b, Meijer et al., 2003, Jaward et al., 2004c) was investigated but generally, passive samplers were mostly used for large scale monitoring projects, taking advantage of the possibility to collect data from remote regions or very large areas. However, since the sampling campaigns were usually restricted to the small number of sites and very limited time periods, reliable information on the spatial and temporal variations of POPs atmospheric concentrations is still sparse. Establishment of long-term monitoring programs may be necessary to assess the local point sources determination and their impact evaluation as well as to enhance our understanding of the contribution of primary and secondary sources and transport to the contamination of various regions. Feasibility of obtaining such data on seasonal variations in ambient air concentrations of persistent organic pollutants on the local scale using the passive air samplers was the main focus of this study.

Section snippets

Air sampling

Passive air samplers consisting of polyurethane foam disks (15 cm diameter, 1.5 cm thick, density 0.030 g cm−3, type N 3038; Gumotex Breclav, Czech Republic) housed in protective stainless steel chambers were employed in this study. The theory of passive sampling using similar devices was described elsewhere (Shoeib and Harner, 2002, Harner et al., 2004).

Sampling chambers were prewashed and solvent-rinsed with acetone prior to installation. All filters were prewashed, cleaned (8 h extraction in

DEZA Valasske Mezirici

DEZA activities comprise of processing of coal tar, mixed pitch oils and crude benzol, production of basic aromatic compounds including benzene, toluene, xylene, production of anthraquinone, anthracene, carbazole, acenaphthene, naphthalene, phthalic anhydride, phthalate plasticizers, impregnating oils, indene-coumarone resins, phenol, cresols, xylenols, and coal tar pitches, production of auxiliary compounds and by-products relating to the industry, electricity and heat generation, industrial

Discussion

When the PUF disks are deployed in the sampling chambers they were estimated to give typical sampling rates of 3–4 m3 of air per day (Shoeib and Harner, 2002). The ambient concentrations represented by the measured amounts of POPs per sample values can therefore be derived. Previous work has also shown that characterization of the uptake profiles of various POPs based on their octanol–air partition coefficients gives satisfactory results and equivalent air sample volumes can be calculated (

Conclusions

Very good capability of passive air samplers to reflect temporal and spatial fluctuation in concentrations of persistent organic pollutants in the ambient air was confirmed in this study. While this sensitivity makes them suitable for the monitoring of local sources, it also needs to be considered when designing large scale monitoring networks.

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic MSM 0021622412 INCHEMBIOL, and EUDG Centre of Excellence EVK1-CT-2002-80012. Special thanks to Kevin Jones and Tom Harner for sharing their experience with the passive air samplers of the same design.

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