Impact/Purpose:

GENERIC RARE OBJECTIVE: The Regional Applied Research Effort (RARE) provides the Regions with a mechanism to address near term research needs through an ORD Laboratory/Center. Any applied research project that a Region identifies and that an ORD laboratory has the expertise to carry out will be considered if the three following conditions are met: 1) projects must be funded through an ORD Laboratory or Center, 2) the project must fall within with defined mission of the selected ORD Laboratory/Center, and 3) proposals must be research-oriented.

Description:

The Clean Air Act as amended in 1990 (the Act) requires that states monitor and regulate the emissions of certain organic hazardous air pollutants. Hence, the purpose of this study is to show through the use of 3M organic passive vapor monitors (OVM), that federal, regional, state or local environmental agencies can monitor areas that are in non-attainment of the ozone standard. This study will attempt to prove that the OVMs are cost effective and that they can be used in remote places that are not monitored because of a lack of an accessible facility. The OVMs will enable the user to monitor several organic compounds that have been identified as being harmful to the public''s health. The Houston-Galveston metropolitan area has been selected for this study because it has a high density of point sources of air toxics mainly due to the presence of petrochemical facilities. In addition, mobile sources also contribute very significantly to the total emission inventory of air toxics in this metropolitan area, which is in non-attainment of the ozone standard. Understanding the relationship between emissions and ambient air concentrations of air toxics, and the consequent potential impacts from these compounds on public health requires extensive ambient air toxics concentration information. Houston has a long-standing and well established monitoring network for air toxics. Twentyfour- hour samples are obtained every sixth day using SUMA canisters at multiple sites. Continuous GC monitoring data is currently available at three of these sites (the number of sites with GC monitoring has varied over time). Since both canister sampling and continuous GC monitoring are relatively expensive approaches for sampling air toxics, only limited ambient concentration data are available for the Houston area, therefore impacting our capacity for evaluating temporal and spatial variability in air toxics-ambient concentrations. As a pilot study, the overall goal of this project is to demonstrate the advantages of a simple and inexpensive passive sampling device to monitor ambient air toxics and demonstrate the device usefulness as a tool for evaluating temporal and spatial variability in ambient concentrations for a group of air toxics in selected Houston-Galveston area census tracts. Sampling for VOCs will be performed at three census tracts in the Houston-Galveston metropolitan area. The targeted air toxics include, but are not limited to: Benzene, 1,3-Butadiene, Carbon Tetrachloride, Chloroform, Chloroprene, Methylene Chloride, Methyl-tertbutyl-ether, Limonene, p-Dichlorobenzene, Styrene, Tetrachloroethylene, Toluene, Trichloroethylene, a-Pinene, p-Pinene, o-Xylene, and m,p-Xylenes. Methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), a major hazardous fuel additive for reformulated gasoline, will also be analyzed.

Record Details: