Granulometry and the content of toxic and potentially toxic elements in vacuum-cleaner collected, indoor dusts of the city of Warsaw

Twenty-seven sites, together with 23 household dust sample sites, representing the home environment, and four public room dust sample sites, representing working environment (mainly offices) have been described in this paper. The latter were examined to obtain an approximate reference to the home environment data. All the samples were collected between May and July 1997 by a vacuum-cleaner method, in the city of Warsaw, Poland. The granulometry of the dusts was determined by their separation into seven fractions in the range 8-500 mum. The concentrations of Cr, Ni, Cu, Zn, Pb, Br and Fe in the samples were investigated in fractions 8-32, 32-63 and 63-125 mum by the EDXRF technique. The results showed higher concentrations of these elements in finer fractions (8-32 mum). The Pb content in the household dusts was found to be unexpectedly low, ranging from 120 mug g(-1) for the 63-125 mum fraction, up to 210 mug g(-1) for the 8-32 mum fraction. Car exhausts could not be determined clearly as the main source of Pb in the indoor household dusts due to the lack of a Pb-Br intercorrelation. In these dusts, only Cr and Zn showed a remarkably high content of 90-100 and 1020-1070 (mug g(-1)), respectively. In the household dusts, strong intercorrelations were present in the three analysed fractions for the metal pairs: Pb-Zn, Pb-Cu, Fe-Cr, and Cu-Cr (weaker). The working environment rooms showed a higher degree of dustiness by 300%, as compared to the dwellings. The dusts collected in the working environment rooms showed slightly higher concentrations of Ni and by 50-100% higher concentrations of: Cu, Zn, Pb, Br than the analysed household dusts. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.