Investigation of dominating routes of personal particulates among workers of battery recycling workshops in a mixed urban industrial environment

*James Mathew¹, Shamsh Pervez², G.Balakrishna³ and Adapa Subramanyam⁴

¹Dpartment of Chemistry, St. Thomas College, Bhilai

^2,3School of Studies in Chemistry Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University, Raipur-492010, India

⁴Abhijeet Projects, Ramdaspeth, Nagpur.

*Corresponding   Author   E-mail:   shamshp@yahoo.co.in

Accepted 30 May, 2012

Monitoring of personal exposure of respirable particulate matter (RPM) or personal particulates among battery recycling workers was carried out to estimate the dominant routes of personal particulates. Three battery workshops have been identified and workshops were categorized depending on the number of batteries recycled/recharged per day. All workshops were lead acid battery recycling workshops. 5 workers were selected from different workshops and after formal consent a time-activity diary including sex, time spent in various microenvironments have been selected. Monitoring of personal exposure of RPM among workers engaged in selected workshops was carried out to evaluate the source contribution estimates of personal particulates using reported protocol. Longitudinal sampling has been done with a frequency of 10. Samples of personal, indoor, outdoor fine particulates have been collected using Personal Sampler (Envirotech Model APM 801) and Handy Sampler (Enviroteh Model APM 821). RPM measurement data have been documented as geometric mean and standard deviation of multiple measurements. Correlation coefficient between the RPM measurement of selected atmospheric levels has been carried out to investigate extent of dependence of personal particulate concentration on its major routes of exposure. Chemical analysis of the samples has been conducted and source and receptor profiles were prepared. Results were executed in the CMB8 model of USEPA to find out the dominant routes of personal particulates and has been observed that particulates of workshop indoor and road traffic were the main routes of exposure followed by residential indoor, ambient outdoor and soil.

Keywords: Battery recycling, lead acid battery, personal particulates, RPM, CMB8.