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DAILY ! ENVIRONMENT REPORT Reproduced with permission from Daily Environment Report, DEN 6-11-10, 06/11/2010. Copyright 姝 2010 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) http://www.bna.com
Air Pollution
EPA Completes School Air Monitoring; Results Available Online, Testing Under Way he Environmental Protection Agency said June 10 that it has completed the initial phase of a project for monitoring and assessing outdoor air quality at 65 schools near large industrial facilities or in urban areas. Results from two of the schools monitored—one in Indiana and another in Minnesota—showed that levels of hazardous air pollutants, or air toxics, were below levels of concern. The Assessing Outdoor Air Near Schools initiative’s next phase is completing data analysis, which has been ongoing for several months. Some results have been reported and published on EPA’s website, and the agency said it will be issuing the remaining results ‘‘throughout the summer and fall,’’ the agency said. ‘‘Today for the first time we have the information we need to make sure our children are breathing clean air in areas that have worried parents in the past,’’ EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a June 10 statement. Schools participating in the program are located near industrial facilities, urban areas, and major highways in 22 states and were monitored for emissions of air toxics such as benzene, acrolein, and heavy metals such as lead. When Jackson launched the initiative in March 2009, she said the work needed to be done to ‘‘to determine the long-term health risks to school children and staff.’’ EPA carried out the monitoring and sampling work with the cooperation of state and local air quality agencies and with $2.5 million from the competitive Community Scale Air Toxics Monitoring Grants program that purchased monitoring equipment and paid for laboratory analysis of the air quality samples from each school.
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Two Schools’ Results Announced. Results of analyses from two schools was also announced June 10: the Pittsboro Elementary School in Pittsboro, Ind., and Minnesota International Middle Charter School in Minneapolis. Levels of key pollutants monitored were below levels of both short-term and long-term concern, EPA said. EPA had already published results in November 2009 from schools in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and South Carolina, where no concentrations of hazardous air pollutants were high enough to be of concern (178 DEN A-1, 9/17/09). Another set of results released in December 2009 revealed ambient air levels for the monitored pollutants were well below the threshold for concern, often by several orders of magnitude. One exception was Enterprise High School in Enterprise, Miss., which in 13 samplings, occasionally approached and once exceeded the level of concern for ambient concentration of acrolein (240 DEN A-6, 12/17/09). Gas, Particulates Monitored. According to EPA, monitors measured two types of pollutants in the outdoor air: pollutants that are in gas form, such as benzene; and pollutants that are in particle form, including metals such as hexavalent chromium, manganese, or lead. Manganese, arsenic, lead, chromium, acetaldehyde, acrolein, benzene, and 1,3-butadiene were on the list as were polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and benzo(a)pyrene (BaP), the latter two comprising a group of over 100 different chemicals that are formed during the incomplete burning of coal, oil and gas, and garbage or are found in coal tar, crude oil, creosote, or roofing tar. According to EPA, PAHs are usually found as a mixture containing two or more of these compounds, such as in soot. Benzo(a)pyrene (BaP) is the most wellstudied of these compounds, and long-term repeated
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2 exposure to BaP has been found to cause cancer, EPA states on its website.
BY JANICE VALVERDE
6-11-10
Further information and sampling results of the EPA Schools Monitoring Initiative is available at http:// www.epa.gov/schoolair/.
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