Delaware City community groups began a new, citizen-led air monitoring project Friday, with help from an international organization that focuses on pollution and other environmental burdens on residents near industrial sites.

The yearlong “Bucket Brigade” initiative aims to capture as many as 60 air samples over a 10-month period, with each sample to be checked for dozens of compounds, including many known to escape from PBF’s 210,000-barrel-per-day Delaware City Refinery.

San Francisco-based Global Community Monitor provided the sampling equipment and record-keeping guidance for the Delaware City Environmental Coalition project, which was financed by a grant from polluter penalty funds managed by the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.

An earlier community pollution study, paid for with grants from DNREC and PBF itself, found an increase in local pollution levels after PBF reopened the plant in 2011, with some compounds exceeding public health limits. State officials cautioned afterward that the high levels could not be linked with certainty to the refinery.

“If you think about it, people are already monitoring the air quality with their lungs,” said Denny Larson, GCM’s executive director. “But there’s really no quantification of what people are exposed to.”

Comments were not available late Friday from DNREC or PBF.

GCM previously assisted in a citizen-led monitoring program organized by Claymont residents after years of unchecked metallic soot and mercury emissions from what is now the Evraz Claymont Steel plant. DNREC officials have said the plant has made substantial progress after years of reform demands and shutdown threats targeting earlier owners.

The coalition scheduled a class for today to teach volunteers how to use one-time sampling devices as well as how to prepare detailed records about odors, soot or other pollution observations.

A separate monitoring effort is under development that will focus on soot and other pollutants associated with crude oil tanker and rail car loading and unloading. PBF recently announced plans for a major expansion of its rail tank car unloading complex, to allow expanded use of heavy, low-cost sulfur-rich crude oil from Midwestern shale formations and oil sands in Canada.