Conference Agenda

Semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) are an important class of indoor pollutants. As the use of SVOCs in building materials and consumer products continues to expand, indoor exposure to SVOCs has become a growing concern. Although adverse health effects, such as permanent impairments on brain, nervous, and reproductive systems, have been extensively confirmed, effective strategies to limit exposure to SVOCs remain hamstrung by our poor understanding of their sources and fate in indoor environments. In the plenary talk, Dr. Xu will tentatively discuss the following questions: what SVOCs are of emerging concerns, how they are emitted and transported in indoor environments, and what are the potential exposures and risks? Specifically, she will introduce an automated non-targeted analysis approach to provide a complete picture of SVOC fingerprints in indoor environments, experimental and modeling efforts to characterize SVOC emissions and indoor fate and transport, and an integrated exposure and pharmacokinetic modeling framework for assessing population-scale exposures and risks. This talk will improve our understanding of the sources and fate of SVOCs in indoor environments, help develop intervention strategies to reduce indoor SVOC exposures, and provide powerful tools for high-throughput risk-based chemical/product prioritization.

The importance of good indoor air quality for the health of the individual was recognized as long as 150 years ago and that period also saw recommendations, which essentially related to questions of ventilation and carbon dioxide. The first evaluation standards for organic and in-organic substances were laid down in the 1970s, often on an empirical basis. It was in the mid-1980s of the 20th century that a shift occurred towards systematically evaluating the re-sults of indoor air measurements, carrying out representative environmental surveys and deriv-ing guideline values and reference values on the basis of toxicological, epidemiological and statistical criteria.

One focus of this presentation concerns the concept of the Committee on Indoor Guide Values of the German Federal Environment Agency. Two guideline values – GV I and GV II – are defined. GV II is an adverse effect-related value based on current toxicological and epidemio-logical knowledge of an effect threshold, usually the LOAEC or a benchmark concentration of the target compound from human or animal studies. GV I is the concentration of a substance in indoor air for which, when considered individually, there is no evidence at present that even lifelong exposure is expected to have any adverse health impacts. In the further discussion, reference is made to other guide value concepts and available databases.

The plenary thus provides an overview on the current international state-of-the-art of guide values, hygiene-based guideline concepts and reference values. It is explained how these guidelines are applied as criteria in private and public buildings, as for example school envi-ronments. In case of reactive compounds like terpenes, the question arises if these guidelines are also protective against reaction products. Substances of potential future interest will be covered in the final outlook.