Development of Low-Cost Methods for Rapidly Measuring Environmental Contaminants

While the detrimental health effects of lead poisoning have been known for many decades, progress in identifying and remediating the sources of lead has been slow. Even though the major sources of lead in the environment and human exposure routes are fully understood, the current way to identify lead in the environment is to simply wait until a child exhibits symptoms of lead poisoning. In the United States, only once a lead poisoned child has been identified will the local health department conduct a lead risk assessment, thus starting the process for locating lead hazards in that child’s home environment and connecting the residents with government assistance programs for remediation. As an alternative, it is possible to screen homes for elevated lead levels preemptively. This would locate high risk housing and connect residents to remediation assistance that could ultimately prevent children from becoming lead poisoned in the first place.

The predominant contributors of lead in the environment include the use of lead in paint before 1978, the use of lead in gasoline before 1995, and the use of lead in piping before 1986. Leaded paint can present an exposure hazard by either contributing lead to indoor dust, especially on high friction surfaces like windows and doors, or by depositing lead into exterior soil along the dripline of the house. The legacy use of lead in gasoline deposited lead in soil, especially along busy roads. Lastly, the use of lead in piping and fixtures can lead to lead in drinking water.

To quickly identify environmental sources that have high levels of lead, the current testing methods must change. This thesis details the development and implementation of the Lead Screening Kit, a kit designed for homeowners to collect soil, paint, dust, and water samples from specifically chosen areas in the home, that can be rapidly analyzed with x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy. It is hoped that this screening kit could be used as an initial screening for health departments, to identify housing that poses a significant risk. This would allow the health departments’ resources to be allocated to high-risk homes before children are lead poisoned.

Additionally, the same water filtration method developed for the lead screening kit was modified to capture to other environmental contaminants in drinking water, specifically arsenic and per-and poly- fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). There are striking similarities between lead and PFAS, as lead was added to the environment in large quantities even decades after its toxic effects were known, unfortunately PFAS are following the same pattern giving chemists the ultimate challenge of identifying and remediating these toxic pollutants even as they are still being put into the environment largely unregulated. Until policy eventually bans the use of PFAS, the ability to measure these contaminants quickly and inexpensively, in drinking water and other matrices, is necessary to locate and hopefully prevent exposure to these toxins before people are poisoned by their environments.