The course provides an overview on the occurrence and behavior of organic and inorganic chemicals in the environment. The course addresses how sampling and chemical analysis can be used to study and understand environmental processes and fate of pollutants.
- Roger Reeve, Introduction to environmental analysis. Wiley.
- F.W. Fifield and D. Kealey, Principles and practical of analytical chemistry.
Learning Objectives
Knowledge acquired: Chemical substances and their physical chemical properties; transport processes and fate of the pollutants in the environment; water/soil/air sampling techniques; sample preparation, extraction, clean-up and analysis for the determination of organic and inorganic contaminants; instrumental techniques.
Competence acquired: develop the skills necessary to choose the appropriate sampling and/or analysis method for determination of volatile, non volatile, polar and non polar compounds in air, water and soil; quali and quantitatively assess the occurrence of pollutants in the environment; evaluate occurrence, sources, transport processes, fate and toxicological and ecotoxicological effects of pollutants; characterize and discuss environmental and health impacts of contaminants
Prerequisites
None
Teaching Methods
CFU: 6
Total hours of the course: 48
Contact hours for Lectures: 26
Contact hours for laboratory: 22
Type of Assessment
Colloquium on the course topics.
Oral power point slide presentation (about 10 minutes) on a cutting-edge environmental topic
Course program
Class lectures:
- Introduction to the main classes of organic and inorganic pollutants in water, air and soil.
- Basics on air/water/soil pollutants: occurrence, production, origin, distribution, transport, transformation and their fate in the environment.
- Legacy, emerging and new persistent organic pollutants (POPs) (such as organochlorine pesticides, dioxins, PCBs, PBDEs, BTEX, PFCs) with focus on chemical-physical properties that influence occurrence and persistence, reactivity, dispersion and decomposition in the environment. Stockholm Convention.
- National and international legislations on limits and methods of analysis of environmental pollutants
- Overview on the most common methods for air/water/soil sampling, sample preparation, treatment and storage.
- Knowledge of the principal extraction methods for environmental analysis: Liquid-Liquid extraction, Solid Phase Extraction (SPE), Solid Phase Micro-Extraction (SPME), Solid-Liquid Extraction, Soxhlet and Soxtec methods, Accelerated solvent extraction, assisted Microwave extraction.
- Instrumental analytical techniques for pollutant analysis, mainly chromatographic techniques, such as high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas-chromatography (GC); mass spectrometry (MS); coupling HPLC-MS and GC-MS;
- Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA/QC) in the analytical laboratory: quality of analytical data, accuracy and precision, recovery, field and lab blanks, repeatability and reproducibility, calibration curve, reference materials, limit of detection, validation of analytical data.
- Environmental toxicology and risk assessment
Laboratory:
Determination of specific pollutants in soil/water/air samples: sampling, treatment and analysis. Instrumental analysis. Data elaboration.