State and federal governments agree to crack down on air pollution

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Respro® UK Ltd

Tougher standards on emissions and a national clean air agreement could help reduce healthcare costs by billions of dollars

The federal and state governments have agreed to work together to improve air quality standards and help Australia adapt to the effects of climate change.

After a meeting on Thursday, environment ministers released a discussion paper for a national clean air agreement proposing stronger air quality standards for sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone, tackling the release of mercury into the environment and curbing shipping emissions.

While the paper stressed that Australia’s air quality is “very good” compared with the rest of the world, the health costs of air pollution cost the country up to $24.3bn a year. Around 2.2% of hospital emissions for children aged under 14 with respiratory problems are due to PM10, a type of particulate released by burning fuels.

There will also be a review of fuel quality standards and measures to control emissions from wood heaters and non-road spark ignition engines. The exact level of these standards has yet to be thrashed out by the governments.

A climate change adaption working group has been established, to be chaired by Lisa Neville, Victoria’s environment minister. The group, which will involve all the states, will work on issues such as water management and renewable energy opportunities.

The inclusion of sulphur dioxide (SO2) in the review has been welcomed by some residents in the Victorian town of Anglesea, who have fought a lengthy campaign against the Alcoa coal mine and power plant, which sits just 1km from a primary school.

Surf Coast Air Action, a community environment group, claims that residents are at risk from the 39,000 tonnes of SO2 pumped out by the plant, citing evidence that it worsens asthma and contributes to heart and lung diseases.

“It’s good news that slowly but surely it’s being recognised that current standards do not protect human health,” said Dr Jacinta Morahan, of the air action group. Morahan removed her own children from the school that sits next to the mine.

“ I think [federal environment minister] Greg Hunt is to be commended for including SO2. It’s a real risk to people and there is community concern here about its impact, as well as the coal dust. At the moment, Alcoa can just say they are meeting the standards so nothing changes.”

Federal Liberal MP Sarah Henderson, whose electorate includes Anglesea, told Guardian Australia she had lobbied Hunt to include the review of SO2.

“My job is to be a strong advocate for the communities I represent and there’s no doubt there’s strong concern about Alcoa’s power plant,” said Henderson, who describes herself as a “strong environmentalist.”

“I’ve been very disappointed that Alcoa haven’t invested in sulphur dioxide scrubbers.

“If we had our time again, the Anglesea coal fired power station would not be built where it is. Developing a coal mine in a pristine part of the world is not a decision governments would make these days.”

Neville said there was “room for improvement” in air quality measures but that there needed to be a national agreement rather than the states going it alone.

“We need a nationally consistent approach to provide certainty to everyone,” she told Guardian Australia.

Neville said while many of the states disagreed with the federal government on its climate change policies, the election of a new Labor government in Queensland provides “whole new options on what we can be doing together to tackle climate change.”

Other matters discussed include the phasing out of microplastics that harm the marine environment and also the banning of non-biodegradable plastic bags.

New South Wales has already committed to reducing microplastics use as well as to establish a deposit scheme by July 2017 for the recycling of beer bottles and other containers.

“The banning of only lightweight bags may not be effective in reducing the total volume of plastic bags washing into our oceans, rivers and waterways,” said NSW environment minister Rob Stokes.

“An effective approach must also be to reduce heavy plastic bags. It must not drive up consumption of so-called degradable bags, that instead break down into small pieces and become micro-plastics in the food chain rather than completely degrading.”

Hunt said there had been “remarkable cooperation” between the federal government and the states and territories to implement the national clean air agreement by July 2016.

“Australian cities have very good air quality by world standards but it could be better, and over the coming decades as population grows, we need to make sure that our air quality improves, that we reduce particulates, reduce sulphur dioxide,” he said.

via State and federal governments agree to crack down on air pollution | Australia news | The Guardian.

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Air pollution monitoring stations get boost in #Budget2015

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Respro® UK Ltd

The environmental affairs department wants citizens to inhale clean air, according to the 2015/16 budget tabled in Parliament on Wednesday.

It plans to increase the number of air quality monitoring stations to 105 by 2017/18, from 65 in 2013/14.

The finalisation of desired emission reduction goals for various sectors would provide a regulatory framework for improving ambient air quality, according to the 2015 Estimates of National Expenditure document.

The SA Weather Service would receive transfers to the value of R570 million over the medium-term which would, among other things, ensure air pollution emissions were constantly monitored.

The department had a R5.9 billion budget for the 2015/16 financial year, most of which would be spent on environmental programmes.

Fighting wildlife crimes, particularly rhino poaching in the Kruger National Park, remained a top priority.

To combat this, an additional allocation of R140m would be allocated to deploy more rangers in the park.

via Air pollution monitoring stations get boost in #Budget2015 – Times LIVE.

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Respro® Masks FAQ: I feel my breathing is restricted, is this normal?

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Respro® UK Ltd

Respro® Skins™ pollution mask - PETAL Mixed #matchyourstyleI feel my breathing is restricted, is this normal?

I think that from the start that you have to understand that any mask will have some level of restriction especially at fast breathing rates for example; when cycling fast.

All of our masks are compatible with aerobic exercise. If you body starts working in an anaerobic capacity then no mask is compatible and you will feel like you need to stop or slow down.,

The best masks will use exhalation valves that ‘dump’ heat, water vapours and Co2; the quicker the better. The removal of these components are the key to comfort. You need to get them out of the mask. The Powa and Powa Elite valve is key at elevated breathing rates.

For more frequently asked questions, go to Respro® Mask FAQ

All Respro® products are available from our website respro.com

Respro® will ship your order to anywhere on the planet free of charge.

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Singapore Air Pollution Poses Foreign Policy Dilemma

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Respro® UK Ltd

If lawyer Jaya Gurunathan wakes up with a sore throat, he often knows the cause right away: the “haze.”  Singapore blames the hazy air pollution that sometimes blankets the city on fires in the less regulated countries that surround it.

Gurunathan said that when air quality is especially bad, his eyes turn red and watery and he exhales black particles.

“I have sinus issues, so this makes it worse,” he said. “Sometimes it makes it hard to work.”

The pollution from fires in nearby Indonesia and Malaysia raise a foreign policy dilemma for the government: What rights does a nation have when other sovereign countries make decisions that harm it?

Blaming Indonesia, Malaysia

Singapore usually points the finger at Indonesia, where the sometimes illegal practice of slash-and-burn land to clear it for farming sends smoke across the ocean to both Malaysia and Singapore.

But this month, the black clouds have been coming from a bushfire in Malaysia. Singapore’s National Environment Agency said in Feb. 15 online post that some residents noticed odour and pollution days after the fire broke out.

“The Malaysian authorities have highlighted that activities are underway to put out the fire in the areas and cap burnt areas with soil to prevent fires from recurring,” the agency said.

Singapore, of course, can’t control the policies of its neighbours. But it is testing the limits on what a government can do to exert influence beyond its borders.

The Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources told Voice of America that it wants to support Indonesia’s “fire-fighting capabilities.”

“Singapore has consistently offered assistance packages to Indonesia over the past years to help combat possible land and forest fires,” a ministry spokesperson said.

Catching criminals

Some progress was made in September, when Indonesia became the last member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to pass the Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution. Environmentalists hope the pact will make it easier to catch criminals setting fires illegally, create early warning systems, and tighten control of land rights permits.

The Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources also said it had a “successful collaboration” with Indonesia to work on a master plan against illegal fires in Jambi province.

Social justice

Any solution to the haze would have to consider the socioeconomic forces behind the fires.

“There’s a lot of poverty, for example,” said Mariska Pagey, an Indonesian who lived in New Zealand and now works in Singapore. “What are we going to do about that?”

The Indonesians who light the fires to clear land often do so out of financial necessity, trying to make money by extracting resources such as palm oil.

“They don’t have any options, that’s where they live,” said Pagey, a procurement officer for a mining company. “If they want to make money, that’s what they have to do.”

Those social issues have to be balanced with public health. The haze has become such a problem of everyday life in Singapore that the government started a website solely devoted to pollution, http://www.haze.gov.sg. During severe periods, Singaporeans go online daily to check the PSI, or Pollutant Standards Index.

via Singapore Air Pollution Poses Foreign Policy Dilemma.

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The Man Measuring Mexico City’s Air Quality Is Part Planner, Part Meteorologist

Posted on February 25, 2015 by Respro® UK Ltd

Armando Retama Hernandez can cite the daily changes in Mexico City’s air quality like a baseball fan remembering a season’s stats.

To explain the pattern of pollution, Retama, who’s the city’s director of atmospheric monitoring, opens his laptop to consult a camera positioned in the foothills southwest of the city. Punching dates and times into the URL, he culls a series of images that demonstrate the regular, noxious movement of dirty air down through the valley. In the morning, the view north is obscure. In the afternoon, the south clouds over. A wave of pollution washes across political boundaries, bridging an administrative gap between the outlying State of Mexico and the central Distrito Federal (DF), before pooling against the enormous mountains to the south of the city.

“The south, which has the fewest sources of pollution, is the most polluted, precisely because it’s being punished by the pollutants generated in the north,” Retama explains. “And the north, which produces the most pollutants, is cleaned by the wind, and by the afternoon, is one of the cleanest zones.”

Time-stamped photographs tell that story; so does a regional wind map. The 32 air monitoring stations perched on rooftops throughout the city offer confirmation.

Monitoring the air in the world’s fifth-largest metropolis requires both a planner’s knowledge of pollution sources and a meteorologist’s sense of atmospheric patterns. The former can be met head-on with policies and restrictions. The latter can only be observed and anticipated.

Over the past two decades, Mexico City has made tremendous progress fighting air pollution. Declared the world’s dirtiest city in 1992, the Western Hemisphere’s biggest agglomeration no longer places highly on the World Health Organization’s rankings of cities with serious particle pollution. The snow-capped volcanoes are once again visible; the sky is once again blue.

That doesn’t mean the district has recovered its mid-century reputation as a breezy subalpine utopia; on the contrary, there are signs that the transformative policies of the past decades may have reached an inflection point. But while Retama works with the city on strengthening anti-pollution measures, his primary responsibility is measuring, documenting and publicizing the city’s ongoing air pollution problem.

In a spare, central room down the hall from Retama’s office in downtown Mexico City, a wall of screens broadcasts all the city’s data on pollutants. It is more public display than real-life command center; all this information is available on the city’s air quality homepage, which, Retama boasts, gets 50,000 to 60,000 visitors a day. Under the driving restrictions of “contingency” days, which occur a half dozen times per year, road traffic falls while website traffic surges into the hundreds of thousands.

What good does all this outreach do? That depends on your perspective. For complacent, older chilangos, who remember the no-outdoor-exercise days of the ’80s and ’90s, the stats are a reminder that even a blue-skied city can be hazardous. For the city’s younger residents, who tend to be more suspicious of the government’s environmental back-patting, the data reinforces the claim that the city’s Air Quality Index often hovers in the same range as in American cities.

Either way, it’s the one issue that no Mexico City resident can escape. In a city with great contrasts between extreme wealth and desperate poverty, the air represents a great equalizer. Leafy enclaves in the city’s south and west inherit traffic exhaust from the center and industrial pollution from the north.

But air currents display significant variance at the local level too. The quantity of car pollutants like carbon monoxide in the middle of a busy street, Retama says, could be as much as three times higher as what a nearby monitor is reporting. At a distance of 50 meters from the source, pollutants decline by 70 percent. A student at MIT showed that the air quality here even improves if you walk away from the curb.

“There has always been an argument about whether we should we should measure the level in the street or at the monitoring stations,” Retama says. “Surely there are people recording in the streets, between cars, saying, ‘Much higher than what the monitoring stations are reporting!’ But the problem with trying to measure personal exposure is that we’d need hundreds or thousands of monitors to have with precision the levels of each contaminant.” Soon, his department plans to deploy smaller, cheaper monitors at street level and in other pedestrian locations, to compare with official data.

But the gap between street-level conditions and rooftop pollution monitors shouldn’t be cause for concern, he stresses. “The big advantage is that people don’t spend the whole day walking in the street. Those are relatively short trips,” he says. Between your office, your apartment, the subway, and your car, your respiratory mix probably closely resembles what is inhaled by the city’s measurement machines. (Counterpoint: If you work as a traffic cop or taxi driver, you might as well be living in New Delhi.)

Those geographic variations are all, to a greater or lesser extent, subordinate to seasonal shifts. The best time to breathe in Mexico City is between June and November. December and January produce temperature inversions, trapping a frisbee of dirty air above the city.

As the rest of Mexico City looked forward to warmer weather, Retama was anticipating the onset of the most difficult time of year, when pollutants cook in the heat, producing long strings of days with elevated ozone levels. Most call it spring; for Retama, it’s Ozone Season.

via The Man Measuring Mexico City’s Air Quality Is Part Planner, Part Meteorologist – Next City.

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Clean Air and Healthy Lungs: How to Better Tackle Air Pollution

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Respro® UK Ltd

When you hear about deadly air pollution, your mind is likely to turn to smog filled cityscapes and congested highways. Cities in India and China have become iconic for air pollution challenges and the health impacts they bring.

But city-dwellers in India and China are not the only ones facing worrying levels of air pollution. From Senegal to Peru, millions of people breathe polluted air every day, suffering a range of health implications. In 2012, an estimated 3.7 million people died from diseases brought on by breathing polluted air. And air pollution is not limited to big cities. Add to that pollution from household sources like cook stoves and heating, and that number goes up to about 7 million, according to the World Health Organization. The impact of pollution is felt across families, cities and societies in terms of health costs, impaired quality of life, lost productivity and missed economic opportunities.

A new World Bank report, Clean Air and Healthy Lungs: Enhancing the World Bank’s Approach to Air Quality Management, examines the Bank’s own experience working with developing countries to improve air quality over a decade, so that the institution and developing countries are better prepared to tackle this major challenge in the future.

The report comes on the heels of the formation of a Pollution Management and Environmental Health program whose focus is to help developing countries reduce pollution and build healthier and more economically stable communities. The Bank recently commissioned a review of its methodology for estimating the cost of air pollution damages that will provide stronger evidence for action on pollution. The Bank is also a partner of advocacy and knowledge sharing coalitions, such as the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, that seek to advance better understanding of pollution challenges and effective solutions.

Africa to join Asia?

Most people would say that pollution is probably the worst in Asia – and for good reason. The majority of the top 50 cities with the highest ambient air pollution concentration are in Asia based on the WHO’s 2014 air pollution database. But cities like Dakar in Senegal and the Delta cities in Egypt are also among the top 50, and Lagos, Nigeria, and Accra, Ghana, are not far behind.

“We need a proactive approach to addressing air pollution in Africa to avoid preventable deaths,” said Yewande Awe, World Bank Senior Environmental Engineer, who led the report. “We need to act now rather than responding to this crisis over time or when polluting patterns are locked into place.” The urban population of the continent is expected to triple to 1.23 billion between 2010 and 2050 – which means one in five people in the urbanized world will be in Africa.

Better data monitoring

The report also found that with a few exceptions the World Bank’s projects that were reviewed did not include air pollution control as a primary objective. As a result, these projects missed the opportunity to collect critical data, and establish baselines that would help measure the success of air pollution reduction interventions that they supported.

Many developing countries lack the infrastructure and standardized methods to collect and interpret data that might inform better decision-making and help set national air quality standards. Better data and systematic monitoring are necessary if countries hope to respond to pollution.  Sound analytical data and monitoring of changes over time were some of the critical factors of success in Santiago, Chile, for example, where authorities implemented cleaner transport solutions that were successful in lowering air pollution.

World Bank projects in Chile, Mongolia and Peru demonstrate the importance of an active dialogue with all stakeholders in developing countries; the need for integrated approaches that start with identification of all pollution sources and end with identification of cost-effective interventions; and the need to involve multiple sectors – from transport to health, urban planning and agriculture. Experience also shows that where countries have made progress in addressing air pollution, a combination of technical, policy and economic measures were effective: for example, in China, pollution discharge fees were instituted in cities, and Mexico City removed regressive and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.

The future of growth in Africa and Asia will largely take place in cities. This urbanization does not have to mean that deadly polluted and un-breathable air will become the new normal. Cleaner transportation, industry, energy, construction, agriculture and waste systems, backed by stronger standards can save lives and support the cities of the future.

“Improving air quality can be achieved in the face of urbanization when proactive leaders are willing to institute the right policies and investments,” said Paula Caballero, Senior Director of the Environment and Natural Resources Global Practice at the World Bank. “A nation can have clean air and healthy lungs, in addition to the economic benefits of urbanization.”

via Clean Air and Healthy Lungs: How to Better Tackle Air Pollution.

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Keep an eye on your city’s pollution in real time

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Respro® UK Ltd

And breathe… High-definition cameras are letting residents monitor the air pollution in their cities online, and in real time.

The Breathe Project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worked with Carnegie Mellon University to create the Breathe Cam – four high-resolution cameras that capture haze and air pollution activity, along with software that visualises the data online. Up and running since December across Pittsburgh, the idea is that residents equipped with accurate information can lobby more effectively for companies and councils to stick to environmental guidelines.

Developed by the CREATE Lab at CMU’s Robotics Institute, the Breathe Cam snaps expansive panoramas of the city 24/7, which are available on the Breathe website alongside data taken from sensors on humidity, temperature and wind speed.

Randy Sargent, senior systems scientist at the Robotics Institute, says that the cameras have five times the resolutionof 4K television. To use the Breathe system, a resident logs on to one of the cameras, where they can see a view of the city as well as archived footage going back one year. They can see any haze over the cityand display data on fine particles, temperature, sulphur dioxide levels, humidity and wind direction captured by six sensors across the city to let users see what might be causing it.

Smoke-stack action
Users can focus on different parts of the city with the Change Detection tool. Selecting one aspect of the view, such as plumes of smoke from a stack, brings up data on pollution levels in that area over previous months, showing when the stack is most active.

The cameras and sensors cover about 200 square kilometres of the city and surrounding areas. Users can share the images and data on social media and can take snapshots of the air quality to send to city officials.

The cameras, and similar ones such as Camnet in Boston and Hazecam in Cleveland, Ohio, allow residents to “see” the pollution in a way they couldn’t before, says Ben Barratt at King’s College London. “The reason that the smog in Beijing is so notorious is people can see the pollution,” he adds.

Monitor your area
Other cities and groups have also deployed systems to track and visualise smog and haze, using maps or videos. They include London Air, developed at King’s, and the Dublin Dashboard in Ireland’s capital. Amsterdam’s Smart City initiative is attempting to increase civic involvement by encouraging residents themselves to install its air-quality sensors where they live.

Response to the cameras has been positive so far, says Johnson. “It’s a tool that is giving people the ability to learn about air quality in Pittsburgh in a way that they never had access to,” he says.

Local groups in Pennsylvania are now deploying their own camera systems. For example, residents in Allegheny County are using the software developed by Sargent and his team to specifically monitor the local Shenango coke plant and ensure it is complying with regulations.

Sargent says that faster broadband speeds and improvements in camera technology have helped. “Five years ago the computing power and the storage would have been prohibitively expensive,” he says.

Roy Harrison at the University of Birmingham, UK, welcomes these sorts of awareness-raising systems in cities. “Air pollution is a major public health issue which ranks highly amongst the avoidable causes of death in both the developed and less-developed world,” he says, “so no hype is necessary, just the facts.”

via Keep an eye on your city’s pollution in real time – tech – 19 February 2015 – New Scientist.

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Researchers detect students are exposed to high levels of air pollution during trips to school

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Respro® UK Ltd

Barcelona

Using a new smartphone app and air pollution sensor researchers from the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) have found that levels of air pollution were more than twice as high during the journeys to school (2.8 microgram/m3) than at home (1.3 microgram/m3) and the levels at school were slightly higher than at home (1.3 microgram/m3) in the city of Barcelona.

Dr. Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, head of the program Air Pollution at CREAL, an allied ISGlobal research centre, and the lead author of the paper, says that “for the first time we used novel smartphone apps (now only used for research but in future can be downloaded for everyone) and sensor technology to measure positioning, physical activity and air pollution simultaneously in children and the results show that air pollution levels are quite variable during the day”. He goes on to say that “when children are closer to cars during journeys to school their air pollution levels increase significantly. Also when they are at school during the day their air pollutions are higher than at home, probably because there are more cars around during the day.”

Researchers conclude that an average children received 46% of their air pollution at home, 32% at school, 13% during their trips to school and 8% elsewhere.

 

29 schools from Barcelona

All this information has been obtained during two normal week days in 2012-2013. 54 school children (aged 7-11) from 29 different schools around Barcelona (included in the BREATHE project) were given a smartphone with CalFit software to obtain information on their location and physical activity level, and a small pollution sensor, the Micro-aethalometer to measure their black carbon levels simultaneously and continuously. Black carbon levels are a good indicator for air pollution levels, particularly for air pollution coming from diesel cars.

The work expands on earlier work where Nieuwenhuijsen and his team measured a range of environmental exposures including air pollution, noise, UV, temperature, and green space, location, and physical activity and health outcomes such as blood pressure, heart rate and lung function and to obtain information on green space and emotional status/mood simultaneously.

Nieuwenhuijsen says “smartphone and sensor technology is developing rapidly and it becomes now easier for people to carry with them a range of sensors to measure their environment and health parameters. This could be used for disease prevention. People can see where there are hotspots of air pollution and avoid them if they want.”

You can participate in this research

Air pollution is responsible for 450000 premature deaths each year in the EU and for this reason researchers are focusing their efforts on this research. Currently, for people living or working in Barcelona that are interested in knowing their mobility, air pollution and health status using new internet and sensor technology, there are now possibilities to participate in new projects at CREAL. CITISENSE (http://barcelona.citi-sense.eu/) is a large European project to develop and implement air pollution and mobility sensors around the city and on people moving through the city to get a better understanding of air pollution in Barcelona and other European cities. PASTA (https://survey.pastaproject.eu/barcelona_es) is a European study to improve mobility and health in the city and anyone can sign up now to participate and provide and obtain new information on how mobility can affect your health.

 

via News – CREAL.

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