Despite the recent efforts to investigate the distribution and fate of persistent organic pollutants in the tropical and subtropical regions of Asia, very little was known about the temporal change of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the environmental ecosystem of China. In this study, three dated sediment cores collected from the Pearl River Delta of southern China were analyzed for a large suite of PCB congeners, from which the temporal profiles of PCB abundances, fluxes, and homologue patterns were constructed. The sedimentary inventories of total PCBs at the sampling sites ranged from 480 to 1310 ng/cm2, at the low end of the worldwide figures. Although production and use of PCBs have been banned or highly restricted in China since the early 1980s, the fluxes of total PCBs continued to increase in the Pearl River Delta sediments. There was a concurrent increase of PCB fluxes and gross domestic product per capita in the region from 1980 to 1997, and a decline of agricultural land use was evident at the same time. Apparently, large-scale land transform since the early 1980s as well as emissions from the PCB-containing electrical equipments were responsible for the sharp rise of PCB fluxes in the recent sediments. The difference in the PCB homologue patterns from 1940 to the mid-1970s was probably indicative of the different timelines of PCB usage in Macao/Hong Kong and mainland China and the differenttypes of technical PCBs commercially used. PCBs were detectable in sediments deposited well before the time frame when production of PCBs began (before 1930) and were relatively enriched in the less chlorinated homologue groups (3Cl and 4Cl PCBs), suggesting the downward mobility of lightly chlorinated PCB congeners in the sediment column.

Emission factors of carbonaceous particles, including black carbon (BC) and organic carbon (OC), and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were determined for five coals, which ranged in maturity from sub-bituminous to anthracite. They were burned in the form of honeycomb briquettes in a residential coalstove, one of the most common fuel/stove combinations in China. Smoke samples were taken through dilution sampling equipment, with a high volume sampler that could simultaneously collect emissions in both particulate and gaseous phases, and a cascade impactor that could segregate particles into six fractions. Particulate BC and OC were analyzed by a thermal-optical method, and PAHs in emissions of both phases were analyzed by GC-MS. Burning of bituminous coals produced the highest emission factors of particulate matter (12.91 g/kg), BC (0.28 g/kg), OC (7.82 g/kg), and 20 PAHs (210.6 mg/kg) on the basis of burned dry ash-free (daf) coal, while the anthracite honeycomb-briquette was the cleanest household coal fuel. The size-segregated results show that more than 94% of the particles were submicron, and calculated mass median aerodynamic diameters (MMAD) of all particles were under 0.3 microm. Based on the coal consumption in the residential sector of China, 290.24 Gg (gigagrams) of particulate matter, 5.36 Gg of BC, 170.33 Gg of OC, and 4.72 Gg of 20 PAHs mass were emitted annually from household honeycomb-briquette burning during 2000. Anthracite coal should be selected preferentially and more advanced burning conditions should be applied in domestic combustion, from the viewpoint of both climate change and adverse health effects.

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