TY - JOUR A1 - Even, Morgane A1 - Wilke, Olaf A1 - Kalus, Sabine A1 - Schultes, P. A1 - Hutzler, C. A1 - Luch, A. T1 - Formaldehyde emissions from wooden toys: Comparison of different measurement methods and assessment of exposure N2 - Formaldehyde is considered as carcinogenic and is emitted from particleboards and plywood used in toy manufacturing. Currently, the flask method is frequently used in Europe for market surveillance purposes to assess formaldehyde release from toys, but its concordance to Levels measured in emission test chambers is poor. Surveillance laboratories are unable to afford laborious and expensive emission chamber testing to comply with a new amendment of the European Toy Directive; they need an alternative method that can provide reliable results. Therefore, the application of miniaturised emission test chambers was tested. Comparisons between a 1 m3 emission test chamber and 44 mL microchambers with two particleboards over 28 days and between a 24 L desiccator chamber and the microchambers with three puzzle samples over 10 days resulted in a correlation coefficient r2 of 0.834 for formaldehyde at steady state. The correlation between the results obtained in microchambers vs. flask showed a high variability over 10 samples (r2: 0.145), thereby demonstrating the error-proneness of the flask method in comparison to methods carried out under ambient parameters. An exposure assessment was also performed for three toy puzzles: indoor formaldehyde concentrations caused by puzzles were not negligible (up to 8 µg/m3), especially when more conservative exposure scenarios were considered. KW - EN 717-3 KW - Formaldehyde KW - Wooden toys KW - Emission test chamber KW - Flask method KW - Microchamber PY - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-520196 VL - 14 IS - 2 (Special issue: Measurement of the environmental impact of materials) SP - 262-1 EP - 262-16 PB - MDPI AN - OPUS4-52019 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Even, Morgane A1 - Hutzler, C. A1 - Wilke, Olaf A1 - Luch, A. T1 - Emissions of volatile organic compounds from polymer-based consumer products: comparison of three emission chamber sizes N2 - The ISO 16000 standard series provide guidelines for emission measurements of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from building materials. However, polymer-based consumer products such as toys may also release harmful substances into indoor air. In such cases, the existing standard procedures are unsuitable for official control laboratories due to high costs for large emission testing chambers. This paper aims at developing and comparing alternative and more competitive methods for the emission testing of consumer products. The influence of the emission chamber size was investigated as smaller chambers are more suited to the common size of consumer products and may help to reduce the costs of testing. Comparison of the performance of a 203 l emission test chamber with two smaller chambers with the capacity of 24 l and 44 ml, respectively, was carried out by using a polyurethane reference material spiked with 14 VOCs during the course of 28 days. The area-specific emission rates obtained in the small chambers were always similar to those of the 203 l reference chamber after a few hours. This implies that smaller chambers can provide at least useful numbers on the extent of polymer-based consumer product emissions into indoor air, thereby supporting meaningful exposure assessments. KW - Comparison KW - Consumer products KW - Emission chamber KW - Reference material KW - Volatile organic compounds PY - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-493697 VL - 30 IS - 1 SP - 40 EP - 48 PB - Wiley VCH-Verlag AN - OPUS4-49369 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -