Global Pilot Study of Legacy and Emerging Persistent Organic Pollutants using Sorbent-Impregnated Polyurethane Foam Disk Passive Air Samplers

Sorbent-impregnated polyurethane foam (SIP) disk passive air samplers were deployed alongside polyurethane foam (PUF) disk samplers at 20 sites during the 2009 spring sampling period of the Global Atmospheric Passive Sampling (GAPS) Network. The SIP disk samplers consisted of PUF disks impregnated with finely ground XAD-4 resin. The addition of XAD-4 greatly improves the sorptive capacity of the PUF disk samplers for more volatile and polar chemicals, and allows for linear-phase sampling over several weeks for these compounds. The SIP and PUF disks were analyzed for polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), neutral polyfluoroalkyl compounds (PFCs), and ionic PFCs. Correlations between sampler-derived air concentrations for PCBs in the PUF and SIP disks samplers were significant (p < 0.05). The SIP disks effectively captured 4−50% more of the low molecular weight PCBs than the PUF disks samplers, and the PUF disks also had limitations for time-weighted passive sampling of neutral PFCs in air. Theoretical uptake cu...