Indoor Emission, Oxidation, and New Particle Formation of Personal Care Product Related Volatile Organic Compounds

Tianren Wu; Tatjana Müller; Nijing Wang; Joseph Byron; Sarka Langer; Jonathan Williams; Dusan Licina

doi:10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00353

Indoor Emission, Oxidation, and New Particle Formation of Personal Care Product Related Volatile Organic Compounds

Environ Sci Technol Lett. 2024 Aug 30;11(10):1053-1061. doi: 10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00353. eCollection 2024 Oct 8.

Authors

Tianren Wu^{1

2}, Tatjana Müller³, Nijing Wang³, Joseph Byron³, Sarka Langer^{4

5}, Jonathan Williams³, Dusan Licina¹

Affiliations

¹ Human-Oriented Built Environment Lab, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
² Civil and Architectural Engineering and Construction Management, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221, United States.
³ Atmospheric Chemistry Department, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Hahn-Meitner-Weg 1, 55128 Mainz, Germany.
⁴ IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, Environmental Chemistry, SE-400 14 Göteborg, Sweden.
⁵ Chalmers University of Technology, Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Division of Building Services Engineering, SE-412 96 Göteborg, Sweden.

Abstract

Personal care products (PCPs) contain diverse volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and routine use of PCPs indoors has important implications for indoor air quality and human chemical exposures. This chamber study deployed aerosol instrumentation and two online mass spectrometers to quantify VOC emissions from the indoor use of five fragranced PCPs and examined the formation of gas-phase oxidation products and particles upon ozone-initiated oxidation of reactive VOCs. The tested PCPs include a perfume, a roll-on deodorant, a body spray, a hair spray, and a hand lotion. Indoor use of these PCPs emitted over 200 VOCs and resulted in indoor VOC mixing ratios of several parts per million. The VOC emission factors for the PCPs varied from 2 to 964 mg g^-1. We identified strong emissions of terpenes and their derivatives, which are likely used as fragrant additives in the PCPs. When using the PCPs in the presence of indoor ozone, these reactive VOCs underwent oxidation reactions to form a variety of gas-phase oxidized vapors and led to rapid new particle formation (NPF) events with particle growth rates up to ten times higher than outdoor atmospheric NPF events. The resulting ultrafine particle concentrations reach ∼34000 to ∼200000 cm^-3 during the NPF events.