Characteristics of atmospheric polychlorinated naphthalenes (PCNs) collected at different sites in northern Taiwan

A review on occurrence and analytical procedures for the evaluation of polychlorinated naphthalenes in human and environmental matrices

“…Several researchers reported occurrences of PCNs in various environmental matrixes. Air samples are collected with either high-volume air samplers [12,14,16,20], or polyurethane foam disk passive air samplers (PUF-PAS) [13,18,116]. In all the studies, the samplers are installed at the sampling locations for a specific length of time and are enclosed in an aluminium foil inside an airtight polyethene bag when the time is due, then stored at less than 5°C for analysis.…”

“…With the commercial availability of many newly synthesized reference standards and development of advanced analytical methods, all CN congeners have been analyzed from various environmental matrixes around the World including North America [124,135], Europe [25][26][27]86,125,[136][137][138], Asia [14,17,38], Africa [18], China [102][103][104][105][106], to mention a few. They were also detected in adipose tissues, blood and other human fluid samples [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37].…”

“…The southern region of the country seems mostly affected, with waste combustion, and discharges from industries being the major sources of PCN into the environment [18]. Dat et al [14] reported on PCN characteristics of air samples during sunny and wintertime at three different sites in northern Taiwan. The mean PCN concentration measured at manufacturing, metropolitan, and rural sites are 172 ± 111, 45.2 ± 8.20 and 45.9 ± 24.4 pg/m 3 respectively.…”

“…The occurrence of PCNs have been widely studied in various matrices around the world; air [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20], fish and seafood's [21][22][23][24], foods [25][26][27][28], biota [8,23,29], human samples [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37], sediment [23,29,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47], water [43,48,49], sewage sludge samples [50]. Nevertheless, studies relating to PCN occurrence in water samples is minimal.…”

“…Owing to their lipophilic nature, poor water solubility and their minute concentrations in water, their isolation from aqueous matrices has been commonly achieved using solid phase extraction [49], and conventional liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) method [43]. Extraction of PCNs from air, solid and other environmental samples has usually been performed using soxhlet extractor with dichloromethane [12,14,38,43], or other organic solvents [23,39]. Other developed methods for extracting PCNs from environmental samples include accelerated solvent extraction or pressurized liquid extraction systems [13,21,39,51,52], and sonication [53].…”