www.thoracic.org C LI P A N D C O P Y Where Does Outdoor Air Pollution Come From? Air pollution is the name for the mixture of harmful particles and gases in the air around us that we breathe. Air pollution is produced by both human activity and naturally occurring events. Burning of fossil fuels by motor vehicles (including cars, buses and trucks) and power plants (including coal-fired and nat...

Emissions from motor vehicle exhausts have been shown to have deleterious effects on the physiology of plant species. Our present study focuses on evaluating the tolerance and sensitivity of selected plant species viz. Dracaena deremensis (good absorber of VOCs) and Dianthus caryophyllus (susceptible to ethylene and formaldehyde (VOCs)) at selected sites which are differentiated on the basis of...

We measured levels of ambient volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at seven sites in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region of China during the Air Quality Monitoring Campaign spanning 4 October to 3 November 2004. Two of the sites, Guangzhou (GZ) and Xinken (XK), were intensive sites at which we collected multiple daily canister samples. The observations reported here provide a look at the VOC distri...

The impact of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) on indoor air quality and on human health is widely recognized. However, VOC contamination in hospital indoor air is rarely studied and chemical compounds that singularly do not show high toxicity are not submitted to any regulation. This study aimed to compare VOC contamination in two different anatomical pathology wards in the same hospital. Hyd...

Since enactment of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, the control and removal of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from contaminated air streams have become a major public concern (1). Consequently, considerable interest has evolved in developing more economical technologies for cleaning contaminated air streams, especially dilute air streams. Biofiltration has emerged as a practical air...

The sol-gel process is a wet-chemical technique (chemical solution deposition), which has been widely used in the fields of materials science, ceramic engineering, and especially in the preparation of photocatalysts. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are prevalent components of indoor air pollution. Among the approaches to remove VOCs from indoor air, photocatalytic oxidation (PCO) is regarded ...

[1] We present a novel capability in satellite remote sensing with implications for air pollution control strategy. We show that the ratio of formaldehyde columns to tropospheric nitrogen dioxide columns is an indicator of the relative sensitivity of surface ozone to emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx NO + NO2) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The diagnosis from these space-based observati...

Epidemiologic studies have suggested the association between environmental exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and the increased risk of incurring asthma. Yet there is little data regarding the relationship between personal exposure to air pollution and the incidence of asthma in children. This study was designed to evaluate the effect of ex...

A method to determine emissions from the actual car fleet under realistic driving conditions has been developed. The method is based on air quality measurements, traffic counts and inverse application of street air quality models. Many pollutants are of importance for assessing the adverse impact of the air pollution, e.g. NO2, CO, lead, VOCs and particulate matter. Aromatic VOCs are of special...

102 ambient VOC species were measured online by a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry/flame ionization detector (GC/MS-FID) at an urban site in Beijing during a heavy pollution episode in December 2014. VOC sources were identified by correlation analysis of particular species pairs. The interspecies correlations of benzene-acetylene, toluene-acetylene, isobutane-propane and ethane-propane were...