ASTM D4861-17

5.1 This practice is recommended for use primarily for non-occupational exposure monitoring in domiciles, public access buildings, and offices.

5.2 The methods described in this practice have been successfully applied to measurement of pesticides and PCBs in outdoor air and for personal respiratory exposure monitoring.

5.3 A broad spectrum of pesticides are commonly used in and around the house and for insect control in public and commercial buildings. Other semivolatile organic chemicals, such as PCBs, are also often present in indoor air, particularly in large office buildings. This practice promotes needed precision and bias in the determination of many of these airborne chemicals.

1.1 This practice covers the sampling of air for a variety of common pesticides and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and provides guidance on the selection of appropriate analytical measurement methods. Other compounds such as polychlorinated dibenzodioxins/furans, polybrominated biphenyls, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and polychlorinated naphthalenes may be efficiently collected from air by this practice, but guidance on their analytical determination is not covered by this practice.

1.2 The sampling and analysis of PCBs in air can be more complicated than sampling PCBs in solid media (for example, soils, building materials) or liquids (for example, transformer fluids). PCBs in solid or liquid material are typically analyzed using Aroclor1.3 A complete listing of pesticides and other semivolatile organic chemicals for which this practice has been tested is shown in Table 1.