Abstract
This study evaluated the emissions of specific indoor sources usually present in Portuguese dwellings in order to understand their impact on the indoor air quality. With this aim, three typical activities were studied including home heating using two types of fireplaces (open and closed) and biofuels (pinewood and briquettes), cooking styles (frying and boiling) in different types of kitchen appliances, and several levels of bread toasting. The levels of specific pollutants were found to be above the established Portuguese limit values including VOCs, formaldehyde, and particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10). Although these emissions are transient and short in duration, the resulting concentrations are high and can severely impact the occupants’ daily exposure. Besides promoting good ventilation, the choice of residential appliances with low emissions should be taken into account. In addition, it is important that occupants perform specific activities following the best practices so that their exposure to pollutants is minimized.
Highlights
The impact of indoor air quality (IAQ) on occupants’ health and welfare is a subject that gathered the attention of the scientific community over the last two decades [1]
In order to understand the main types of dwellings and which type of activities were performed by their occupants, an online questionnaire was conducted over three months with a total of 296 individual answers from 17 of the 20 Portuguese districts
This study may be considered as the first approach toward understanding the effects of daily activities such as biomass home heating and cooking on the indoor air quality, which contributes towards assessing the exposure of occupants
Summary
The impact of indoor air quality (IAQ) on occupants’ health and welfare is a subject that gathered the attention of the scientific community over the last two decades [1]. There has been extensive research on micro-environments where people spend their time with the aim of understanding exposure patterns. The studied micro-environments were mainly buildings in which people spend a significant fraction of the daytime such as offices [2,3], public buildings like schools [4,5,6], dwellings [7], and other indoor places where leisure activities [8,9,10] are developed. The need to understand the exposure levels in an integrated perspective has started to gain consensus since individuals spend around 90% of their time in different indoor environments. Considering only one micro-environment is not representative of the daily overall exposure. Understanding the individuals’ exposure during the different periods of the day in specific micro-environments is fundamental for providing a real and an integrated assessment [11,12,13]
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