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A 14-week air quality study, characterizing the indoor and outdoor concentrations of 18 VOCs at four El Paso, Texas elementary schools, was conducted in Spring 2010. Three schools were in an area of high traffic density and the fourth school, considered as a background school, was situated in an area affected minimally by stationary and mobile sources of air pollution. Passive samplers were deployed for monitoring and analyzed by GC/MS. Differences in the concentration profiles of the BTEX species between the high and low traffic density schools confirmed the pre-defined exposure patterns. Toluene was the predominant compound within the BTEX group and the 96-hr average outdoor concentrations varied from 1.16 to 4.25 μg/m 3 across the four schools. Outdoor BTEX species were strongly correlated with each other (0.63 < r < 1.00, p < 0.05) suggesting a common source: vehicular traffic emissions. As expected, the strength of the associations between these compounds was more intense at each of the three high-exposure schools in contrast to the low-exposure school. This was further corroborated by the results obtained from the BTEX inter-species ratios (toluene: benzene and m, p - xylenes: ethylbenzene). Certain episodic events during the study period resulted in very elevated concentrations of some VOCs such as n -pentane. Indoor concentration of compounds with known indoor sources such as α –pinene, d -limonene, p -dichlorobenzene, and chloroform were generally higher than their corresponding outdoor concentrations. Cleaning agents, furniture polishes, materials used in arts and crafts activities, hot-water usage, and deodorizing cakes used in urinal pots were the likely major sources for these high indoor concentrations. Finally, retrospective assessment of average ambient BTEX concentrations over the last twenty years suggest a gradual decrement in this border region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Children spend substantial amount of time within school microenvironments; therefore, assessing school-based exposures is essential for characterizing and preventing children's health risks to air pollutants. Indeed, the importance of characterizing children's exposures in schools is recognized by the US Environmental Protection Agency's recent initiative to promote outdoor air monitoring networks near schools. As part of a health effects study investigating the impact of traffic-related air pollution on asthmatic children along the US–Mexico border, this research examines children's exposures to, and spatio-temporal heterogeneity in concentrations of, traffic-related air pollutants at four elementary schools in El Paso, Texas. Three schools were located in an area of high traffic density and one school in an area of low traffic density. Paired indoor and outdoor concentrations of 48-h fine and coarse particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10–2.5), 48-h black carbon (BC), 96-h nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and 96-h volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were measured for 13 weeks at each school. Outdoor concentrations of PM, NO2, BC, and BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, m,p-xylene, o-xylene) compounds were similar among the three schools in the high-traffic zone in contrast to the school in the low-traffic zone. Results from this study and previous studies in this region corroborate the fact that PM pollution in El Paso is dominated by coarse PM (PM10–2.5) and fine fraction (PM2.5) accounts for only 25–30% of the total PM mass in PM10. BTEX species and BC are better surrogates for traffic air pollution in this region. Correlation analyses indicate a range of association between indoor and outdoor pollutant concentrations due to uncontrollable factors like student foot traffic and varying building and ventilation configurations across the four schools. Results suggest the need of micro-scale monitoring for children's exposure assessment, which may not be adequately characterized by the measurements from a centralized monitoring site. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), PM2.5, and organic and elemental carbon (OC and EC) were measured in 48 h integrated samples collected in the indoor and outdoor air in Los Angeles, CA, Houston, TX, and Elizabeth, NJ from July 1999 to June 2000. The objective of the study was to evaluate the hypothesis that outdoor air pollution contributed strongly to indoor air pollution. The measured partition coefficients of PAHs, Kp,meas, in the individual samples were well correlated with the compounds’ sub-cooled liquid vapor pressure, pLo. Values of Kp,meas varied by about two orders of magnitude for any given value of vapor pressure. These variations in gas/particle partitioning of PAHs were higher than the estimated systematic and random error of Kp,meas and are related to the aerosol characteristics and sampling conditions. Stepwise multiple linear regression analysis (MLR) of the pooled data, which included pLo at 25°C, temperature, fOC and fEC as independent variables, explains 84.5% of the variability of the partition coefficients. This is higher than the explained variance when pLo is used as a single parameter (77.5%). The relative importance of each variable for prediction of PAH partition coefficient is determined by partial coefficients of determination. Vapor pressure at 25°C (RpoL2=0.84) and temperature (RT2=0.21) are the two most important predictors followed by fEC (RfEC2=0.12) and fOC (RfOC2=0.038). Both EC and OC carbon are important predictors of gas/particle partitioning of PAHs, with EC being a better predictor. Because EC is highly correlated with (and is a good tracer of) primary combustion-generated OC, this result suggests that PAHs more readily sorb on combustion-generated aerosol containing EC. Enrichment of the indoor aerosol in non-combustion OC suggests that sorption of PAHs is more important in the indoor air compared to the outdoor air. The MLR developed in this work will improve prediction of gas/particle partitioning of PAHs in indoor and outdoor air. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]