Abstract
Museums air quality can be negatively affected by treatments with heavy metals compounds employed to prevent pest infestations. Among these, the past use of mercury dichloride (HgCl2) on herbaria artifacts currently produces high levels of indoor atmospheric gaseous mercury (Hg0) and possibly of particulate bound Hg (PBM), i.e., the particulate matter containing Hg. This study evaluates the PBM pollution in the Central Italian Herbarium (Natural History Museum of the University of Florence, Italy), characterizing the size range and chemical speciation with SEM-EDS microanalysis. The analysis of the total Hg concentration in the samples allowed to calculate the workers exposure risk to this pollutant. PBM is almost totally classifiable as fine particulate with a significant dimensional increase in a period of scarce attendance of the Herbarium rooms. The microanalysis indicates that Hg is essentially bound to S, highlighting the change of Hg speciation from the original association with Cl. The average Hg concentration reveals a potential health risk for workers as result of multiple Hg exposure pathways, mainly by ingestion. The study provides information for characterizing PBM pollution that could affect a workplace atmosphere and a useful basis to evaluate and correctly design solution strategies to reduce the contamination levels and protect workers’ health.
Highlights
Published: 15 June 2021The increasing attention devoted to the indoor air quality is the direct result of the high amount of time that people spend indoors during the day in addition to the potential occurrence of airborne chemical and biological pollutants [1]
The results of the present study clearly indicate that PBM constitutes a non-negligible source of Hg pollution that affects the Central Italian Herbarium atmosphere; preliminary information about PBM dimensional and elemental characteristics have been collected
As well as the size range, the chemical composition changed over time, underlying that HgCl2 solution used to treat plant samples still sublimates
Summary
Published: 15 June 2021The increasing attention devoted to the indoor air quality is the direct result of the high amount of time that people spend indoors during the day (about 88% for adults and 71–79% for children) in addition to the potential occurrence of airborne chemical and biological pollutants [1]. As evidenced by Schieweck [3], the specificity of the museum, i.e., the type of collections it contains and how they were treated to guarantee their protection, influence the air inside This is, for example, the case of natural history collections where heavy metals (i.e., metals with atomic number greater than 20 and elemental density greater than 5 g cm−3 , e.g., [4]) contamination is often observed as a direct consequence of pesticide treatments or taxidermal preparations [5,6]. This issue especially concerns mercury (Hg), which was highly employed in botanical collections, as shown in several studies carried out over the past few decades [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]
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