Indoor environment factor · measured in µg/m³
Black carbon
Part of: Particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀)
Also: BC, elemental carbon, soot, absorbance
The strongly light-absorbing carbon fraction of particulate matter, formed only by combustion. It is measured optically rather than by composition, and it is used as the marker that separates the combustion part of a particle mass from everything else in it.
What it is
Particulate matter is defined by size and therefore contains everything of that size, combustion soot and cooking grease and resuspended soil alike. Black carbon narrows it: only flames make it, so a measurement of it is a measurement of how much of the particle load came from burning something.
The measurement is optical. Air is drawn through a filter and the darkening of the filter is read as light absorption, which is converted to a mass by an assumed absorption coefficient — so different instruments and different assumptions give numbers that are not strictly comparable, and the literature also uses elemental carbon, a thermal-optical measurement, for nearly the same thing.
Indoors it distinguishes what ventilation brought in from what the household made. Where cooking is done on solid fuel, the indoor fraction is large; in a home on clean fuel beside a busy road, most of it came through the wall.
What the studies report
| Linked to | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gestational diabetes | OR 1.08 (1.06–1.10) | pregnant women | systematic review and meta-analysis of 35 epidemiological studies (33 cohort, 1 cross-sectional, 1 case-control) covering 6,939,725 pregnant women | F-0083 Association of air pollution and fine particulate matter (PM… (2023) | machine |
| Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) | — | pregnant women · personal exposure of the pregnant woman | prespecified exploratory analysis of the HAPIN randomised trial in Guatemala, India, Peru and Rwanda: pregnant women were randomised to a liquefied petroleum gas stove and fuel or to their usual biomass stove, with 24-hour personal PM2.5, black carbon and carbon monoxide measured and haemoglobin measured during pregnancy; intention-to-treat and exposure-response mixed models | F-0911 Sinharoy Effects of cooking with liquefied petroleum gas versus bioma… (2026) | machine |
| Cognitive performance | beta -0.10 (-0.19–-0.01) per 0.9 z-score per interquartile range increase | — · home | prospective study of Chinese adults (INTERMAP-China): exposure to household air pollution estimated and related to z-standardised domain-specific and overall cognitive scores from the Montreal Cognitive Assessment | F-1783 Tseng Household air pollution from solid fuel use as a dose-depend… (2022) | machine |
| Solid fuel | median 1.7 | — · home | measurement study: indoor UFP, PM10, PM2.5, black carbon and CO measured with handheld monitors in the living areas of five non-smoking households in Guildford using four stove types and four solid fuels during winter | F-0100 Particulate matter exposure from different heating stoves an… (2025) | machine |
| Solid fuel | median 1.5 | — · home | measurement study: indoor UFP, PM10, PM2.5, black carbon and CO measured with handheld monitors in the living areas of five non-smoking households in Guildford using four stove types and four solid fuels during winter | F-0104 Particulate matter exposure from different heating stoves an… (2025) | machine |
| Solid fuel | other 23.8 | — · rural settlement (ambient) | 6-week intensive winter measurement campaign in 2025 in a rural settlement near Budapest (Solymár) with an optical particle counter and a portable aethalometer, sources traffic, biomass burning and suspected illegal waste burning in residential stoves | F-0184 Kheirandish Characterization of carbonaceous aerosol particles emitted b… (2026) | machine |
| Biomass fuel | median 10.8 | adult women in rural areas · personal exposure of the woman in the household | cross-sectional analysis of the baseline visit of the Household Air Pollution Intervention Network (HAPIN) trial in rural Guatemala, India, Peru and Rwanda: 24-hour personal PM2.5, black carbon and carbon monoxide of adult women against body mass index, with linear and logistic models adjusted for age and household assets | F-0857 Ndikubwimana Exposure–response relationship of household air pollution on… (2025) | machine |
| — | other 36 | pregnant women · personal exposure of the pregnant woman | study of predictors of personal exposure among pregnant women in rural Rwanda: repeated 24-hour personal PM2.5, black carbon and carbon monoxide against lighting source, stove type and fuel, with best-subsets regression models | F-1018 Predictors of Personal Exposure to Fine Particulate Matter, … (2025) | machine |
Each row is one Finding — a sentence as printed in one study, recorded with its page in the Coridum Knowledge Base. Follow the Finding number for the exact wording and the citation. Checked says who verified the row: machine means every automatic check passed and the surrounding text was read; person means someone read the sentence in the document. Rows are re-checked by a person over time. The studies are curated in the Coridum Knowledge Base; the reading of them together is a Claim, shown separately.
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Black carbon. Coridum Knowledge G-0135, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0135/