1993 Volume 3 Issue 4 Pages 709-716
The “Passive Gas Tube”, as a monitoring sampler for organic solvent fume in the working environment, was applied to the estimation of the amount of respiratory personal exposure to the volatile halogenated compounds (VOCs) .
Contaminations of VOCs in a commercial “Passive Gas Tube” were satisfactorily low level to detect VOCs in indoor and outdoor air. Atmospheric concentrations of VOCs measured by the“Passive Gas Tube” method, were highly correlated to the values by the active sampling method employing Carbosieve G as an adsorbent.
A study on the personal exposure and residential indoor air of VOCs was carried out using a probability sample of 14 homes from Sendai city. Mean concentrations of the personal exposure of five VOCs, i.e. chloroform, 1, 1, 1-trichloroethylene, carbon tetrachloride, trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene, were 0.234 ppb, 0.404 ppb, 0.080 ppb, 0.054 ppb and 0.070 ppb, respectively. Respiratory carcinogenic risks estimated from the data of personal exposure were 42×10-6 for chloroform, 12×10-6 for carbon tetrachloride, 5.2×10-6 for tetrachloroethylene and 0.3×10-6 for trichloroethylene.
