Author: Danecha Goins

The city of Minneapolis is doing an Air Quality study and needs your help. They are looking for a few volunteers in each neighborhood to host a device (see image to right) that will collect air samples for a few days in November. By volunteering you’ll be helping us gain a clearer picture of the quality of the air in our neighborhood relative to the rest of Minneapolis and the state. Information about the study and who to contact below:

We are conducting a city wide air quality monitoring project for volatile organic compounds (VOCs).  We will be placing approximately 120 air samplers around the city to obtain sampling data for 77 different chemicals.  We are in need of volunteers who live in the City of Minneapolis to place air samplers at their place of residence. I am contacting your community organization in hopes that you can put word out about this project in your community. We have received great response so far and people are excited to learn more about air quality in their neighborhood.

Volunteers will need to have a location outside and off the ground where they could place the sampler (i.e. a porch, table, chair).  The sites cannot have people who may smoke near the sampler.  For example, the shared patio of an apartment complex would not be a good location. Attached you will find a picture of the sampler. We are using Summa canisters, which are stainless steel electropolished (or “summa” polished) passivated vessels used to collect a whole air sample. To collect a sample, the Summa canister valve is opened and the canister is locked in a designated area for a period of time (for our study, this is 72 hours) to allow the surrounding air to fill the canister and achieve a representative sample. The valve is closed before the canister is sent to a laboratory for analysis.

We will need volunteers to sign a consent form and attend a short demonstration before taking the sampler to their residence.  They will need to place the sampler outside of their residence November 4^th– 7^th and return it during regular business hours on November 8^th to one of two locations in Minneapolis. Anyone who is interested please e-mail me by October 16^th at jenni.lansing@minneapolismn.gov and include your residence address with zip code. As emails come in to us with prospective volunteers, we will be mapping the residence addresses. We will be selecting locations based upon our need to distribute the samplers evenly across the grids. Once we have completed this map, we will notify prospective volunteers by email to let them know if they have been selected to participate in the study.

Attached you will also find a map (PDF and jpeg formats) that includes our study areas and shows prospective volunteers that have already signed up. We will select two residential locations within each of the 34 zones for sampling. The attachments also include a Word document that you may distribute and a picture of the Summa canister. Please let me know if you would like to communicate with your community but need more time past the October 16^th deadline.

Thank you,

Jenni

Jennifer Lansing

Environmental Services

250 South 4th St – Rm 414

Minneapolis, MN 55415

Office: 612-673-3023

Cell: 612-709-9977

Jenni.Lansing@minneapolismn.gov