Evaluación de niveles de BENCENO en nuevas áreas complementarias en el centro urbano de la ciudad de Guayaquil y en combustibles, para formular recomendaciones sobre el control de este contaminante, por parte de las autoridades ambientales competentes.

Abstract

Nowadays, environmental pollution has been a critical topic debated internationally, because of the emissions of hazardous chemical compounds that puts in danger human health. This is why organizations like World Health Organization had established permissible limits of toxic chemical compounds, in order to guarantee air quality and prevent health risks in humans. There are a lot of pollutants that can seriously affect human health, however this work focus on benzene, that has been identified as toxic and carcinogenic, to which human beings should be exposed to minimum amounts or concentrations in order to prevent serious damages in the immune system and respiratory problems. In Ecuador there is a National Air Quality law, even though there is zero knowledge about the air quality in the whole country. For this reason, in 2010 the Ecuadorian Ministry of Environment tried to establish a national plan to improve air quality, in this document it was identified that in Guayaquil there was no air quality monitoring network, so there is no information about the pollutants that can affect people, thus this is the interest of this investigation to analyze benzene concentrations in the downtown area, in order to acknowledge if traffic is a critical incident of the concentrations of benzene.