Food Safety and Environmental Stewardship Program

Although communities often want and need chemical monitoring data to characterize chemicals in their environment or from their activities, air monitoring equipment is often cost prohibitive or technically impractical. We are further developing air monitoring bio-analytical tools that employ our passive sampling device (PSD). PSDs require no external power, require minimal training for quality controlled sampling, and can be quickly and inexpensively deployed. PSDs are capable of providing qualitative and quantitative characterization of exposure to the bioavailable vapor phase fraction of legacy and emerging contaminants in the atmosphere. We demonstrate our PSD’s utility in two different scenarios; at the interface of community tribal lands and high intensity industrial activities, and in Native American fish smoking activities.  Legacy and emerging PAHs were characterized for both scenarios.

Communities adjacent to highly industrialized lands often want to understand the contribution of contaminants of concern from industrial activities to their ambient activities.  The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community (SITC) offered their lands to further test our developing air PSD technology and to address these kinds of questions.  PSD were deployed at SITC, which borders a petroleum facility, for a yearlong study, from these PSD samples legacy and emerging PAHs were identified and quantified.  The results indicate spatial and temporal trends that were related to the activities of the tribal community and the petroleum facility. 

While PSDs have been demonstrated as a surrogate of fish for aquatic environment assessment, atmospheric PSDs have not been previously used as a surrogate of food for preparation technique assessment.  Community-based requests often include understanding the effects of special food preparations that are culturally important.  The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) requested an assessment of their fish smoking methods.  As part of a larger study, we deployed air PSDs during the CTUIR smoking events to further evaluate the utility of using our PSD as a surrogate of smoke-processed fish.  In a side-by-side study the PSDs were paired with salmon during smoking.  PAHs were quantified from the air PSD and compared with the smoked salmon.  The results show excellent promise for an alternative method for assessing food smoking preparation techniques.