Current Status and Prospective of Hazardous VOC in Ambient Air

In this article, we reviewed the monitoring status of hazardous VOC in ambinet air in Korea and some developed countries such as USA, Japan, and UK. In many countries, two types of VOC monitoring stations are being operated, i.e., for hazardous VOC and photochemical VOC. Each country has different target VOC but all includes benzene. Korea, Japan, and UK have a national ambient air quality standard for benzene, but no national standard has been established in the USA. For sampling of the hazardous VOC, the adsorbent method is adopted in Korea and UK, while the canister method is used in the USA. Both of adsorbent and canister methods are used in Japan. USA and UK have only non-automatic method to measure the hazardous VOC, and the individual samples are being sent to their national laboratories for integrated analysis. On the other hand, Korea and Japan have automatic and non-automatic methods to measure the hazardous VOC. Local governments or regional environmental agencies in Korea and Japan have the authorization for the sampling and analysis of VOC. According to a field study to evaluate the performance of automatic VOC monitoring system, controlling the moisture in the air sample was identified as the most important problem. However, careful attention must be given to using a moisture removing device such as Nafyon dryer, because of unexpected artifacts formation. In order to have reliable data, it is highly recommended not only to use internal standards, but to use appropriate hydrophobic adsorbents as a cold trap in any automatic on-line VOC monitoring system.