Professor Richard Corsi
Cockrell School of Engineering Professor Richard Corsi recently discussed the hidden sources of air pollution in homes with The Academic Minute podcast, a daily public radio podcast that provides a daily dose of research from colleges and universities around the world.
Corsi, a professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, researches issues related to indoor air quality, including sources and control of indoor air pollution and human exposure to indoor toxins.
Listen to Corsi's podcast or read his full commentary below.
During a lifetime the average American spends less than four total years outdoors and over 70 years inside of buildings. This includes 50 years inside our own homes. It is not surprising that most of the pollution that we inhale during our lifetime occurs indoors. During the past two decades my students, staff and I have studied sources and transformations of indoor air pollutants, how people are exposed to indoor pollution, and ways to reduce these exposures.
For example, we've studied new microcomputers, identifying them as sources of dozens of chemicals that are heavily regulated outdoors. We've studied how chemicals in paint migrate into gypsum board and continue to emerge for decades.
We're documenting how toxic chemicals emitted from moth repellents adsorb to clothing and magnify our exposure to those chemicals when we wear contaminated clothes.
Heated and breathing manikins allow us to study how body orientation and the heat given off by the human body affects our exposure to toxic chemicals emitted from cleaning products, and even from the mattresses on which we spend one-third of our lives.
We've explored how chlorine in dishwasher and laundry detergents react with soiled plates and clothes to form and release chloroform and other toxic chemicals that are heavily regulated in our drinking water.
And we have long been studying how indoor ozone reacts with chemicals in fragrances and even bio-based green building materials to form dozens of potentially harmful chemicals.
My team also derives solutions to indoor air pollution problems. We have explored strategies for how best to shelter in place during extraordinary events, methods for expediting the self-cleansing of chemically-contaminated homes, and applications of unique architectural materials that help to remove harmful pollutants from indoor air.
Richard Corsi is the E.C.H. Bantel Professor for Professional Practice in the Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin.
