Moss Bag Preparation: A Low-Cost Technique in Monitoring Airborne Particulate and Toxic Elements

Abstract

Air pollution has created a lot of problems in the developed and developing countries. To avoid or reduce these problems, constant monitoring of the air should be ensured. The conventional techniques is costly because it requires a lot of money and time consuming. Biomonitoring has been the alternative method. Moss, lichens and plants are biomonitors available to entrap air pollutants. The aim of this paper is to discuss one of the ways of monitoring air pollution -Moss bag technique. To do this, types, choice, preparation, handling of bags after preparation of moss were discussed. From the literatures consulted, it was discovered that there were differences in the techniques used by the researchers. In all, the use of mosses with emphasis on the employment of moss bag have proved to be a powerful tool in airborne particulate and toxic elements. To conclude, developing countries should focus more on this technique because it will reduce cost of air monitoring.

The use of spider webs in the monitoring of air quality—A review

“…Thus, it could complicate the collection of mosses for transplantation, whereas with spider webs, the clean material can be obtained from laboratory‐bred spiders. A further limitation is that, when mosses are used in the form of “moss bags” (i.e., mosses placed into mesh net bags or mats and hung in the air; Abulude & Elisha, 2017) to measure air pollution, the bags could dry out leading to changes in their efficiency in accumulating metals, depending on environmental conditions (Szczepaniak & Biziuk, 2003). Moreover, one study compares spider webs with mosses (van Laaten et al, 2020).…”

Applying Social Science to Bring Resident Stakeholders into Pollution Governance: A Rural Environmental Justice Public Health Case Study

“…Air pollution affects human health and is considered a direct avenue of toxic exposure (Dockery 2009), but techniques that use sensors to provide calibrated measurements of heavy metal contaminants in the air are a prohibitively expensive monitoring approach involving technical equipment that is not easily available or operated (e.g., Gatziolis et al 2016). As toxicological and epidemiological studies indicate that heavy metal exposure is potentially highly toxic (e.g., Kongtip et al 2006; Yang and Omaye 2009), scientists in Europe (e.g., Ares et al 2012; Ryzhakova et al 2017), Africa (e.g., Abulude and Elisha 2017), and the United States (e.g., Gatziolis et al 2016) have been developing techniques that use biomonitors as an affordable and useful approach to estimate the presence of toxic elements in the atmosphere.…”