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Over the course of a month, Vance and her colleagues conducted a variety of daily household activities, including cooking a full Thanksgiving dinner in the middle of the Texas summer. In 2018, Vance co-led the collaborative HOMEChem field campaign, which used advanced sensors and cameras to monitor the indoor air quality of a 1,200-square-foot manufactured home on the University of Texas Austin campus. 'We wanted to know: How do basic activities like cooking and cleaning change the chemistry of a house?' 'Homes have never been considered an important source of outdoor air pollution and the moment is right to start exploring that,' said Marina Vance, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at CU Boulder.

The previously underexplored relationship between households and air quality drew focus today at the 2019 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., where researchers from CU Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and the university's Department of Mechanical Engineering presented their recent findings during a panel discussion. What's more, airborne chemicals that originate inside a house don't stay there: Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from products such as shampoo, perfume and cleaning solutions eventually escape outside and contribute to ozone and fine particle formation, making up an even greater source of global atmospheric air pollution than cars and trucks do.

The hidden source