May 10, 2022
Chengkang Chen from Peking University used CiP-CAFE to assemble the first global inventory of the production, use, in-use stocks, and emissions of short-, medium- and long-chain chlorinated paraffins. This work has just been published in ES&T.
April 12, 2022
The UTSC media department wrote this story about our recent study published in ERL on the trade-embodied emissions of PBDEs.
April 8, 2022
Yingming Li and colleagues from the RCEES of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a paper in the Journal of Hazardous Material describing a study using the XAD-resin based passive air sampler for measurements in and around Ny Ålesund.
April 1, 2022
Sivani’s KOA database paper prompted a discussion whether we can trust KOA values for hydrogen-bonding solutes, when they are derived from gas chromatographic retention times. Rodgers et al. wants them to be given the benefit of the doubt. We believe the evidence from comparisons with predicted values suggests that the higher the H-bonding capability of a compound, the more biased the measured value is likely to be.
March 22, 2022
The international trade in chemicals, products and waste implies that those benefitting from the use of a product containing chemicals do not necessarily bear all of the exposure risk associated with making and disposing this product. In this paper in Environmental Research Letters we demonstrate that it is feasible to quantify the emissions that are being transferred between various world regions. In this study by undergraduate student Kate, we use the PBDEs as an example and show that it is specifically the trade in e-waste that is responsible for the largest emissions transfer.
March 14, 2022
Check out the UTSC website for a news story on our recent paper on traffic as a major source for urban water pollution. Read it here.
March 10, 2022
Building on all of the data from Abha’s and Tife’s PhD theses, we identified traffic as the main contributor of many types of organic contaminants to urban waters (not receiving sewage treatment plant outflows), including many that are not intuitively linked with vehicles and roads. This is described in a new paper in Environmental Research Letters.
March 2, 2022
Jie from the Abbatt group developed and tested a technique that makes it possible to measure partitioning to cotton fabric from indoor air. Read about it in Environ. Sci. Technol..
February 15, 2022
Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts just published Yuening’s paper on graphical tools suitable for planning and interpreting PUF-based passive air sampling campaigns. These charts were made with James’ PAS-SIM model. Instead of using the PAS-SIM software, it is now possible to simply read the model results (such as the length of the linear uptake period, the time to equilibrium or the loss of depuration compounds) from those charts.
January 19, 2022
Yuhao today picked up more than 25 kilograms of polar bear poop from our collaborators at the Toronto Zoo. Plenty of material for experiment into the thermodynamics of biomagnification!
