Impact of maritime traffic on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, metals and particulate matter in Venice air

Abstract

Harbours are important hubs for economic growth in both tourism and commercial activities. They are also an environmental burden being a source of atmospheric pollution often localized near cities and industrial complexes. The aim of this study is to quantify the relative contribution of maritime traffic and harbour activities to atmospheric pollutant concentration in the Venice lagoon. The impact of ship traffic was quantified on various pollutants that are not directly included in the current European legislation for shipping emission reduction: (i) gaseous and particulate PAHs; (ii) metals in PM 10 ; and (iii) PM 10 and PM 2.5 . All contributions were correlated with the tonnage of ships during the sampling periods and results were used to evaluate the impact of the European Directive 2005/33/EC on air quality in Venice comparing measurements taken before and after the application of the Directive (year 2010). The outcomes suggest that legislation on ship traffic, which focused on the issue of the emissions of sulphur oxides, could be an efficient method also to reduce the impact of shipping on primary particulate matter concentration; on the other hand, we did not observe a significant reduction in the contribution of ship traffic and harbour activities to particulate PAHs and metals.

Multi-Year Concentrations, Health Risk, and Source Identification, of Air Toxics in the Venice Lagoon

“…The sources' identification and sources' impact evaluation have been carried out by the use of the atmospheric vanadium concentration, to calculate the primary contribution of ship traffic to PM 10 , the Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF), and the Diagnostic Ratios (DR). Moreover, by integrating our data with those obtained in other previous studies (Contini et al, 2012;Gregoris et al, 2016), this study provides a significant temporal trend of the characterization of aerosol in the Venice Lagoon in terms of PM 10 concentration and its elemental characterization.…”

“…The constant R has a suggested value of 8205.8 (Agrawal et al, 2009); V a is the ambient vanadium concentration; F V,HFO is a term indicating the typical V content (ppm) in heavy fuel oils (HFO) used by vessels. In this work the value of 65 ± 25 ppm was used, as previously done in the harbors of Venice (Gregoris et al, 2016), and Brindisi (Cesari et al, 2014). The values of the primary contribution of ship traffic to PM 10 in MM and PS were published in Gregoris et al (2016) as averages of the period 2007-2013.…”

“…In this work the value of 65 ± 25 ppm was used, as previously done in the harbors of Venice (Gregoris et al, 2016), and Brindisi (Cesari et al, 2014). The values of the primary contribution of ship traffic to PM 10 in MM and PS were published in Gregoris et al (2016) as averages of the period 2007-2013. In this work the contribution was updated until 2015, with the additional site of CH.…”

Air Pollution in Ancona Harbour, Italy

“…The European Directive 2005/33/EC [7] introduced more stringent marine-fuel sulphur limits for ships at berth or cruising inside European coastal waters. This reduced the contribution of ship cruising, manoeuvring and hoteling to atmospheric pollutants such as SO 2 [8] and primary particulate matter (PM 10 , and PM 2.5 ) [9].…”

Scheduling ships movements within a canal harbor

“…Ships may access the lagoon only through two inlets and may sail only through narrow canals that are dredged within the shallow water. The movement of ships in the lagoon is an important issue for the city of Venice, since it has been shown that it has an impact on the city in terms of both air pollution (Gregoris et al, 2016) and wave generation (Parnell et al, 2015). Indeed, the passage of large cruise ships has given rise to a progressive regulation (Casagrande, 2015).…”