Monitoring of ambient BTX at Monterotondo (Rome) and indoor–outdoor evaluation in school and domestic sites

Abstract

Results from a five month monitoring campaign of BTX (benzene, toluene and the sum of ethyl benzene, o-xylene, m-xylene and p-xylene), performed at Monterotondo, a little town 23 km NE of Rome, and correlation of the measured concentrations with meteorological and natural radioactivity data are presented and discussed. This campaign allowed us to extrapolate a pattern of the annual distribution of benzene in the town. A map, showing the average distribution of pollutants, is presented, as a useful tool to manage an appropriate policy of air pollution. A contemporary indoor-outdoor investigation has been performed at five homes and two classrooms of Monterotondo and at thirteen homes and thirteen classrooms in the outskirts of Rome. Non-smoking people and low polluted sites were chosen for this campaign, in order to highlight if commonly used domestic materials could act as internal sources. Data, obtained by employing long-term diffusive samplers, are compared with a parallel experiment showing the day-night indoor-outdoor trend. The obtained results, confirmed through statistical analysis of data, let us conclude that there is evidence of internal sources at homes whilst, in the schools, depletion phenomena prevail, probably due to the walls adsorption.

Long‐Term Diffusive Samplers for the Indoor Air Quality Evaluation

“…This is probably due to the fact that the cigarette smoke is an intense internal source, particularly for the polycyclic aromatics, while, in the other situations, indoors concentrations of higher PAH homologues result to be lower than outdoors. It is worth of note that these observations agree with results obtained in a study performed two years ago, regarding to the mono-aromatic compounds 9 .…”

Indoor Air Quality Assessment of Elementary Schools in Curitiba, Brazil

“…Ruchirawat et al (2005) reported indoor benzene levels of two schools in Bangkok of around 15 µg m −3 , while outdoor the results are nearby 6.7 µg m −3 . In schools of Rome, the results showed a positive increase in indoor benzene concentration, a depletion of xylenes and no significant variation of toluene with respect to the outdoor values (Bertoni et al 2002). Guo et al (2003) identified the potential sources of BTEX in the five different microenvironments, office, home, school, shopping mall, and restaurant, in Hong Kong.…”

Calcium Oxide Matrices and Carbon Dioxide Sensors

“…In fact, diffusive samplers do not need any energy source, are small and silent, quite inexpensive and people in charge of using these methods of sampling require only a little training for the positioning and removal of the devices. Moreover, if a long-term sampling strategy is adopted [17–19], costs can be further lowered. In fact, it allows evaluating the time-weighted average concentration of pollutants over statistically significant periods, in the order of several days or weeks.…”