Occurrence, Dynamics and Reactions of Organic Pollutants in the Indoor Environment

Abstract

The indoor environment is a multidisciplinary scientific field involving chemistry, physics, biology, health sciences, architecture, building sciences and civil engineering. The need for reliable assessment of human exposure to indoor pollutants is attracting increasing attention. This, however, requires a detailed understanding of the relevant compounds, their sources, physical and chemical properties, dynamics, reactions, their distribution among the gas phase, airborne particles and settled dust as well as the availability of modern measurement techniques. Building products, furnishings and other indoor materials often emit volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds. With respect to a healthy indoor environment, only low emitting products, which do not influence indoor air quality in a negative way, should be used in a building. Therefore, materials and products for indoor use need to be evaluated for their chemical emissions. This is routinely done in test cambers and cells. Many studies have shown that the types of sources in occupational and residential indoor environments, the spectrum of emitting compounds and the duration of emission cover a wide range. The demand for standardized test methods under laboratory conditions has resulted in several guidelines for determination of emission rates. Furthermore, it has now been recognized that both primary and secondary emissions may affect indoor air quality. The problem may become more dominant when components of different materials can react with each other or when catalytic materials are applied. Such products derived from indoor related reactions may have a negative impact on indoor air quality due to their low odor threshold, health related properties or the formation of ultrafine particles. Several factors can influence the emission characteristics and numerous investigations have shown that indoor chemistry is of particular importance for the indoor related characterization of building product emissions. This paper provides an overview of the current state of the art research on the mentioned topics.

Temporal trends of decabromodiphenyl ether and emerging brominated flame retardants in dust, air and window surfaces of newly built low‐energy preschools

“…For SVOCs with relatively low log K oa (<10) the main fraction would be in the gas phase, while those with higher log K oa would preferentially partition to particulate matter such as suspended particles or settled dust. 50,51 F I G U R E 2 Temporal trends of the detected BFRs (pg/m2) on the window surface during sampling periods 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 (SP1, SP2, SP3, SP4 and SP5 respectively) and season (quarter 1 (Q1), quarter 2 (Q2), quarter 3 (Q3) and quarter 4 (Q4)) in the reference preschool (RP), and lowenergy preschools A, B, and C (LEP A, LEP B, and LEP C, respectively). 37,38 Also, SVOCs that are present in building material and indoor products tend to be released at a slow rate via gas phase volatilization and could therefore take a long time to be sorbed to indoor surfaces.…”

A large-scale test set-up for measuring VOC emissions from wood products under laboratory conditions in simulated real rooms

“…Wood and wood-based building products, with their specific emissions, are also sources of long-lasting indoor VOC emissions (Salthammer and Bahadir 2009;Yu and Kim 2012). Softwoods emit mainly terpenes and aldehydes (Risholm-Sundman et al 1998), but other wood species may also set free other substances (Jensen et al 2001).…”

Ozone in indoor environments: Research progress in the past 15 years

“…I acknowledge that since after Weschler (2000), there have been several review studies on this subject (e.g., Weschler, 2001Weschler, , 2004Weschler, , 2006Weschler, , 2009Weschler, , 2011Weschler, , 2015Weschler, Wells, & Poppendieck, 2006;Rohr, 2013;Salthammer & Bahadir, 2009;Wolkoff, 2013;Wolkoff, Wilkins, Clausen, & Nielsen, 2006). However, these studies, albeit detailed, either did not focus specifically on ozone or addressed aspect(s) of ozone studies.…”