Characterising Personal, Household, and Community PM Exposure in One Urban and Two Rural Communities in China

Overview

Journal Sci Total Environ

Date 2023 Aug 30

PMID 37647956

Authors

Ka Hung Chan

Xi Xia

Cong Liu

Haidong Kan

Aiden Doherty

Steve Hung Lam Yim

Neil Wright

Christiana Kartsonaki

Xiaoming Yang

Rebecca Stevens

Xiaoyu Chang

Dianjianyi Sun

Canqing Yu

Jun Lv

Liming Li

Kin-Fai Ho

Kin Bong Hubert Lam

Zhengming Chen

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Background: Cooking and heating in households contribute importantly to air pollution exposure worldwide. However, there is insufficient investigation of measured fine particulate matter (PM) exposure levels, variability, seasonality, and inter-spatial dynamics associated with these behaviours.

Methods: We undertook parallel measurements of personal, household (kitchen and living room), and community PM in summer (May-September 2017) and winter (November 2017-Janauary 2018) in 477 participants from one urban and two rural communities in China. After stringent data cleaning, there were 67,326-80,980 person-hours (n = 441; n = 384; n = 364; 307 had repeated PM data in both seasons) of processed data per microenvironment. Age- and sex-adjusted geometric means of PM were calculated by key participant characteristics, overall and by season. Spearman correlation coefficients between PM levels across different microenvironments were computed.

Findings: Overall, 26.4 % reported use of solid fuel for both cooking and heating. Solid fuel users had 92 % higher personal and kitchen 24-h average PM exposure than clean fuel users. Similarly, they also had a greater increase (83 % vs 26 %) in personal and household PM from summer to winter, whereas community levels of PM were 2-4 times higher in winter across different fuel categories. Compared with clean fuel users, solid fuel users had markedly higher weighted annual average PM exposure at personal (78.2 [95 % CI 71.6-85.3] μg/m vs 41.6 [37.3-46.5] μg/m), kitchen (102.4 [90.4-116.0] μg/m vs 52.3 [44.8-61.2] μg/m) and living room (62.1 [57.3-67.3] μg/m vs 41.0 [37.1-45.3] μg/m) microenvironments. There was a remarkable diurnal variability in PM exposure among the participants, with 5-min moving average from 10 μg/m to 700-1200 μg/m across different microenvironments. Personal PM was moderately correlated with living room (Spearman r: 0.64-0.66) and kitchen (0.52-0.59) levels, but only weakly correlated with community levels, especially in summer (0.15-0.34) and among solid fuel users (0.11-0.31).

Conclusion: Solid fuel use for cooking and heating was associated with substantially higher personal and household PM exposure than clean fuel users. Household PM appeared a better proxy of personal exposure than community PM.

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