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  • Wang Maher et al. ES&T revised May 8 2019

    Rights statement: This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Environmental Science and Technology, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. To access the final edited and published work see https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b06629

    Accepted author manuscript, 2.02 MB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Efficient Removal of Ultrafine Particles from Diesel Exhaust by Selected Tree Species: Implications for Roadside Planting for Improving the Quality of Urban Air

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>18/06/2019
<mark>Journal</mark>Environmental Science and Technology
Issue number12
Volume53
Number of pages11
Pages (from-to)6906-6916
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date16/05/19
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Human exposure to airborne ultrafine (?1 μm) particulate pollution may pose substantial hazards to human health, particularly in urban roadside environments where very large numbers of people are frequently exposed to vehicle-derived ultrafine particles (UFPs). For mitigation purposes, it is timely and important to quantify the deposition of traffic-derived UFPs onto leaves of selected plant species, with particularly efficient particle capture (high deposition velocity), which can be installed curbside, proximal to the emitting vehicular sources. Here, we quantify the size-resolved capture efficiency of UFPs from diesel vehicle exhaust by nine temperate-zone plant species, in wind tunnel experiments. The results show that silver birch (79% UFP removal), yew (71%), and elder (70.5%) have very high capabilities for capture of airborne UFPs. Metal concentrations and metal enrichment ratios in leaf leachates were also highest for the postexposure silver birch leaves; scanning electron microscopy showed that UFPs were concentrated along the hairs of these leaves. For all but two species, magnetic measurements demonstrated substantial increases in the concentration of magnetic particles deposited on the leaves after exposure to the exhaust particulates. Together, these new data show that leaf-deposition of UFPs is chiefly responsible for the substantial reductions in particle numbers measured downwind of the vegetation. It is critical to recognize that the deposition velocity of airborne particulate matter (PM) to leaves is species-specific and often substantially higher (?10 to 50 times higher) than the "standard" V d values (e.g., 0.1-0.64 cm s -1 for PM 2.5) used in most modeling studies. The use of such low V d values in models results in a major under-estimation of PM removal by roadside vegetation and thus misrepresents the efficacy of selected vegetation species in the substantial (≫20%) removal of PM. Given the potential hazard to health posed by UFPs and the removal efficiencies shown here (and by previous roadside measurements), roadside planting (maintained at or below head height) of selected species at PM "hotspots" can contribute substantially and quickly to improve in urban air quality and reductions in human exposure. These findings can contribute to the development and implementation of mitigation policies of traffic-derived PM on an international scale.

Bibliographic note

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Environmental Science and Technology, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. To access the final edited and published work see https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b06629