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Air Monitoring
Clean Air – Still a Political Objective After 60 years
As the 60th anniversary of the Great Smog of London passes, Jim Mills, Managing Director of Air Monitors, explains why air quality is once again at the top of the political agenda.
Despite the improvements that have been made to certain aspects of air quality, large numbers of deaths still result from air pollution.
It is now just over 60 years since the Great Smog of London that was responsible for the deaths of around 4,000 people and led to the development of the Clean Air Act of 1956. This landmark piece of environmental legislation resulted in substantial improvements to ambient air quality. However, large numbers of people are still dying from air pollution and as a result, air quality is once again making the headlines.
The 1956 Clean Air Act introduced a number of measures to reduce air pollution, such as the introduction of smoke control areas in selected towns and cities in which only smokeless fuels could be burned. Industrial furnaces could no longer emit ‘dark smoke’ and households were offered grants to convert from coal to smokeless fuel.
The move to cleaner forms of heating, including electricity and gas, significantly lowered levels of particulate and sulphur dioxide pollution. In addition, the Act relocated power stations away from cities, and forced the height of some industrial chimneys to be increased.
60 years later
Despite the improvements that have been made to certain aspects of air quality, large numbers of deaths still result from air pollution. According to the European Commission, some 500,000 people die prematurely in the EU 27, mainly due to exposure to high levels of fine particulate matter (atmospheric microparticles or ‘dust’ of a diameter of less than 2.5 microns), which originates from residential heating, transport (diesel cars and trucks, ships and planes), agriculture, industrial processes and power production.
Europe is not the only region to be affected. A report recently published in The Lancet entitled ‘Global Burden of Disease’ reported that in 2010, more than 2.1 million people in Asia died prematurely from air pollution, mostly from the minute particles of diesel soot and gases emitted from cars and trucks. Worldwide, a record 3.2 million people a year died from air pollution in 2010, compared with 800,000 in 2000, the report said. As a consequence, air pollution now ranks in the world’s top 10 list of killer diseases for the first time.
Author Details:
Jim Mills, Managing Director Air Monitors Limited Unit 1 Bredon Court
Brockeridge Park, Twyning
Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire GL20 6FF, UK.
Tel: +44 (0) 1684 857530
Email:
enquire@airmonitors.co.uk Web:
www.airmonitors.co.uk
IET Annual Buyers’ Guide 2013
Research, published in the Lancet on 10th July 2013, demonstrated a direct link between particulate matter exposure and the incidence of lung cancer. The researchers studied 312,944 cohort members which contributed 4,013,131 person-years at risk. During the follow-up period (mean 12.8 years), there were 2,095 incidents of lung cancer and a statistically significant association was found between the risk for lung cancer and the levels of fine particulates.
In a separate study, also published in the Lancet, researchers concluded that air pollution has a close temporal association with heart failure hospitalisation and heart failure mortality. Although more studies from developing nations are required, the report described air pollution as ‘a pervasive public health issue with major cardiovascular and health economic consequences, and it should remain a key target for global health policy.’
Air quality is good over most of the UK but towns and cities continue to suffer. It has been estimated that 4,300 Londoners now die prematurely each year as a result of air pollution (29,000 UK-wide, according to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural
www.envirotech-online.com
Affairs). This is no longer because of coal fires but is attributed to nitrogen dioxide and fine particulates, mainly from vehicles. London may have the highest levels of nitrogen dioxide of any capital city in the EU, with some areas of the city showing three times the legal limit.
The populations of the world’s major cities have rocketed in recent decades and the volume of traffic has grown exponentially, so it is hardly surprising that a new set of air quality challenges have arisen.
Political recognition
In November 2011 Janez Potočnik, European Commissioner for the Environment, expressed his determination to make 2013 the ‘Year of Air’. He acknowledged that there has been substantial improvement in air quality in recent decades but in the light of the environmental/climate issues surrounding air quality and the large number of premature deaths resulting from air pollution, he said: “The challenge for all of us is to address the shortcomings of existing regulations in a decisive and coordinated way. This will require the goodwill of policy-makers at all levels – European, national, regional and local – as well as other stakeholders such as the automotive and oil industries.”
The European Environment Agency’s 2011 report on air quality reflects air quality improvements for a number of key parameters, with concentrations of sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide falling by about half in the decade ending in 2009. However, the report also shows that in 2008, levels of nitrogen oxide, ozone and particulate matter have risen, fuelling concerns about overall air quality, especially in urban areas.
A further problem associated with tiny particles is their ability to act as “sponges” carrying small amounts of toxic species such as PAH’s and Dioxins which are adsorbed onto Black Carbon particles and transported deep into the body. PM10 and PM2.5 monitoring measurements provide a total figure for everything with mass in the sample and thereby assume that all particles are of equal significance. In reality this is not the case because some of the particles are benign from a human health perspective or are not anthropogenic so are of less interest from an air quality management perspective.
It is fortunate that the fine particles (from the combustion of fossil fuels) that are of most interest are Black Carbon and can be measured with an Aethalometer, which employs an optical method to only measure those fine particles which are black. A further consideration with Black Carbon is its role in climate change because, after carbon dioxide, it is the second largest contributor to current global warming.
Encouragingly, as of 7th February 2013, 27 countries, including the UK, the European Union, and all of the partners of the UNEP Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) have agreed to implement ‘fast action on reducing black carbon, methane, some hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and other short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs)’. These reductions have the potential to slow a global temperature rise by up to 0.5 degrees C by 2050, to reduce air pollution-related deaths by as much as 2.4 million and crop losses by around 30 million tonnes annually.
The United Nations recently published data which showed that mercury emissions are rising in a number of developing nations.
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