Domestic activities and PM generation: A contribution to the understanding of indoor sources of air pollution

Few researches on domestic indoor air pollution have given quantitative information on the variation of the characteristics of the indoor source of particulate matter (PM). The purpose of this work was to investigate the emission characteristics of the common indoor particle sources. More specifically, this paper is intended to contribute to the understanding of how normal domestic activities could affected the human health. The emission sources of PM studied in this work was cooking, vacuuming, ironing and the use of deodorant spray. Cooking activities were expected to be one of the major source of indoor particles and the features of the cookers may affect the characteristics of emissions resulting from cooking. For this reasons, the results of a previous study based on the variability of the power of the cooker were reported, in order to study the sustainability of natural gas from the point of view of the induced indoor human exposure to PM. Measurements were performed by a GRIMM analyser, able to measure 16 granulometric classes from 0.3 to 20 µm. The study found that the activity of cooking and the use of deodorant spray are the sources that produce the higher indoor concentration levels compared with the other sources studied.