About the seminar:

Humans spend most of their lives indoors, providing long exposure times to indoor pollutants. The abundance of pollutants differs between the indoor and outdoor environments due to factors like high surface area and indoor activities. Bleach cleaning releases high concentrations of chlorine containing gases (Cly) which are direct respiratory irritants and drive secondary chemical reactions that further degrade indoor air quality. Despite the high potential for Cly to degrade indoor air quality, the indoor literature on these compounds, outside of disinfection related activity, is extremely sparse. Preliminary data show that Cl2 is formed indoors—at considerable quantities—unrelated to disinfection. Outdoor atmospheric literature provides a larger body of work that views Cly production mechanistically. In this seminar, I address the opportunity to apply chlorine chemistry, assumed to occur outdoors, to indoor Cl2. Understanding indoor sources of Cly is integral to evaluating inhalation exposures to indoor pollutants.