Sustainable Assessing Technologies for Environmental and Health Monitoring

Dear Colleagues,

Modern society exhibits a constantly growing industrialization and overall dependence on processes known for being responsible for a significant part of the pollution identified in air, water, or soils. Additionally, these pollutants have a preponderant impact on human health in both short- and long-term exposure scenarios, being directly responsible for a vast range of diseases and health conditions. Due to these well-known contemporary challenges, the demand for newer, innovative, and sustainable technologies for purposes of environmental and health monitoring has increased significantly.

The presence of pollutant compounds in both indoor and outdoor environments is often caused by daily objects and activities. Personal care products, creams, perfumes, detergents, pesticides, food, building materials, furniture, or paints are some of the most common pollutants-emitting sources. Additionally, activities like driving, cooking, smoking, or painting are equally abundant sources of hazardous compounds like volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon oxides (COs), nitrogen oxides (NOs), and particulate matter (PM), among others. Evidently, the emission of all the aforementioned compounds into the environment plays a significant role in the degradation of air, water, and soil quality, not to mention the impacts on both fauna and flora. In regard to human health, chronic exposure to these pollutants has been linked to the development of pathologies that range from simpler cases, like allergies or pruritus, to more serious diseases, like carcinogenic pathologies.

Being aware of their hazardousness, several procedures and technologies have been developed and employed to monitor the most relevant pollutants and assess their impact on both the environment and human health. Among all these technologies, one can list the electronic noses of thin film-based gas sensors and the chromatographic and spectrometric techniques, like gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, or ion mobility spectrometry. Nonetheless, all these procedures exhibit some limitations that prevent or weaken their utilization in all the relevant scenarios, namely, the cost of operation, the necessity of complex processes of sample preparation, the lack of libraries for identification of the analytes and of calibration curves for purposes of quantification, and the impossibility of performing in-situ analyses.

Due to all the mentioned facts, this Special Issue aims to gather innovative and original works whose goals pass by developing and implementing new, innovative, and sustainable technologies for environmental and health monitoring. The topics of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Sustainable technologies for environmental monitoring;
• Sustainable technologies for health monitoring;
• Development of new sustainable technologies;
• Implementation of new sustainable technologies in real scenarios;
• Improvement of current technologies aiming to increase their sustainability;
• Development of new sustainable procedures for pollutant assessment;
• Development of new techniques for health assessment;
• Detection, identification, and quantification of pollutants;
• Indoor and outdoor air, water, and soil quality assessment;
• Environmental and medical applications of separation techniques;
• Current and future trends of analytical techniques for environmental and medical purposes;
• Assessment of health impacts related to exposure to hazardous pollutants.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Pedro C. Moura
Dr. Sofia Pessanha
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• sustainable technologies
• environmental monitoring
• health monitoring
• pollutants assessment
• spectrometric technologies
• chromatographic technologies
• electronic noses
• hazardous exposure