Is PVC in House Fires the Great Unknown Source of Dioxin?

Fire Emissions of Organics into the Atmosphere

“…As the yields of dioxins varied considerably between experiments, the emission factor was expressed as a range, between 0.012 and 2.2 ng TEQ/g, corresponding to the lowest value from the furnace tests and the highest value from the cable-tests. This range of values corresponds rather well to the estimate of dioxin emission from fires with PVC conducted by Carroll [24]. CarrollÕs investigation was based on the assumption of a soot yield of 0.0065 g soot/g PVC and results from quantitative soot analyses, and gave a dioxin yield in the range of 0.030-3.5 ng TEQ/g combusted PVC.…”

Analysis of toxic effluents released from PVC carpet under different fire conditions

“…Total amounts of PCDD/F in the residue from PVC carpet ranges from 11 to 394 pg I-TEQ/g of burned material, corresponding to 41-1170 pg I-TEQ/g residue. These measurements can be compared to the results summarised by Carroll (1996) for PVC fires from a number of literature sources, which indicate variation of between 5 and 28300 pg I-TEQ/g residue, variation of nearly four orders of magnitude. Our measurements seem to cover the lower range of the literature values.…”

“…It is possible that the ashes from these three fires were contaminated with soot prior to sampling, resulting in significantly higher values of PCDD/F than reported in the present contribution. The PCDD/F load in soot from PVC fires ranges between 35000 and 539000 ng I-TEQ/g soot (Carroll, 1996). Thus a small amount of soot deposited on the ash could elevate PCDD/F concentrations in the residue from high pg level to low ng level, leading to a large variation in literature values.…”

Poly(vinyl chloride) and its fire properties

“…If the combustion gases were not handled properly in incinerators, larger dioxin generation would result. Moreover, studies have also demonstrated that the amount of dioxins generated from PVC in dwelling fires is negligible compared with the overall emissions of dioxins …”