UK Edition
Air pollution: are you more at risk than you think – even in your home?
“By the way, your house is slowly filling with particles as we speak.” It isn’t exactly what you want to hear sitting in your kitchen on a dank wintry afternoon. I am discussing the toxicity of the atmosphere in my south London flat with air pollution scientist Dr Gary Fuller over lemon drizzle cake.
Because when you learn you have knocked nearly two years your life simply by virtue of growing up in smog-filled London, the only thing for it is cake. Between us on the table is a little white plastic implement which is apparently gauging the number of harmful particles in the air.
As we talk the corresponding live graph on an app on Dr Fuller’s phone slowly rises. “Your flat appears to be about as polluted as most of my journey here,” says Dr Fuller, calmly, as if he hasn’t just essentially told me that I my home isn’t any safer than if I had pitched a tent at the side of Oxford Street.
“In fact, there were areas when I was on the bus around Oval on my way here when I was in the green. Now I’m in the orange. So it was less polluted there than it is here.” He concedes after some nervous questioning on my part that this may be down to the fact that speeding through London on the no. 59, he was never in one place long enough for the sensor to pick anything up.
He’s just being kind, but I’ll take it because as his new book The Invisible Killer: The rising global threat of air pollution and how we can fight back, suggests, pollution could be one of the greatest threats to our life. The ailment which is never written on a death certificate, but known to significantly impact your long term health. It’s estimated the average Londoner is losing about 16 months of their life because of the air pollution they inhale every day.
And it’s not just those of us who live in the capital who have to fear its effects — in the countryside, people spend more time sitting behind exhaust pipes in traffic, while fertilizers sprayed across crops in the Spring contribute to the worse period for air quality recorded every year. Meanwhile, in every household cleaning products, deodorants and scented candles are all playing their part in bringing down the air quality in our homes.
It has been a constant battle for governments since the 1950s, when the notion that what we were emitting into the atmosphere was affecting our health first came to the forefront.
Anyone who has seen the “Pea Souper” episode of The Crown (or indeed recalls that dreadful week in London’s history first-hand) will know that our attitude to air pollution changed forever after The Great Smog in 1952, when 10,000 people died as a direct result of the thick pollution which hung throughout the capital when cold, still weather trapped the smoke from coal fires across the city.
The Clean Air Act followed in 1956, ruling that it would be illegal to burn wood in open fires, shifting domestic heat sources to cleaner alternatives like electricity, gas and cleaner coals, and vowing to relocate power stations away from cities. Since then, our relationship with pollution has been an evolving beast, with blame landing at the feet of governments, car companies, big industries and individuals alternately.
The trouble is, Dr Fuller says, that while the government has an important part to play in this, they tend to focus on one pollutant at a time, and never quite go far enough.
“In the 1950s we cleared up the coal fires, but we didn’t pay attention to the transport. Traffic levels in London are decreasing. Diesel vehicles are getting progressively cleaner thanks to progressively tighter standards. We’ve passed this concept of peak car. We’ve tidied up a lot of the things that come from industry like insolvents. All the way through we’re narrowly focused on one source [at a time].”
And yet, around four and a half per cent of homes in London alone still burn wood (68 per cent do so illegally in open fires); meanwhile many areas of the city still endure up to twice the recommended limit of nitrogen dioxide from diesel cars and gas heating.
One of the worse spots, in further heartening news, is where I get on and off the tube every day, while another is just outside the Telegraph’s office in SW1. Couple that with the fact that notwithstanding a brief stint in the West Country for university, I have only ever lived in major cities and I’m starting to get a little panicked.
So why, 62 years after the Clean Air Act do we still not have a handle on air pollution? “When I started in this game a lot of the particles you breathed in if you looked at them chemically they were sulphurous,” explains Dr Fuller, who works at Kings College London. “Now we find they’re nitrogen based from diesel emissions and from hydrogen and gas burning.
“If you’d asked a Londoner from the 50s what the chief pollutant was on their street they would have pointed to the chimney pot. Now, you’d point to the street.”
But while everybody has been focused on the terrible scourge of traffic and diesel, a fashion for home wood burning has crept under the radar. “In Grand Designs, they go on a visit at the end, one year on, and they’ve always got two things. One is a new baby they never had and the other is a wood burner,” jokes Dr Fuller.
“It’s being sold as climate neutral, because it’s a natural wood product but it’s a pollutant. We see a lot of wood burning pollution a this time of year in the run up to Christmas when people have the family round and think ‘we’ll light a fire’.”
Household products, meanwhile, have become one of the biggest areas of pollution concern. “There have been some studies that say the biggest source of solvents that is now entering the air is in the products in our homes.
“It’s not just things like paint which you might use occasionally, it’s all the personal care products, from cleaning to deodorants, to room sprays.
It’s why, he says, the onus now needs to be on individuals to make changes. It’s also why my flat is reading so highly on the pollutant monitor. As well as living very near a main road, I have been burning scented candles, which have been slowly emitting harmful particles into the air. “Particles are anything in the air within a certain size range which when you breathe goes straight down into your lungs and isn’t really stopped by your nose,” he explains.
“At the moment you’ve got your candles burning so there will be a good deal of soot in here. You must find if you keep candles over there on your mantelpiece that when you wipe over your fireplace that side is sooty.” The Scandis must have a lot to answer for here. It’s our pathetic attempt to be more hygge which has got us in this mess.
At least the houseplants we’re all filling our homes with are going some way to detoxifying the air, though Dr Fuller says even this is a bit of a fallacy. “Trying to get pollution out of the air is like trying to take the milk out of a cup of tea. You’re better off treating the pollutant itself. Exposure to these pollutants really shorten your life, that’s the bottom line,” says Dr Fuller. “People still die of everyday things - breathing problems, heart attacks, strokes. It’s just that we get more people dying of them in polluted places.”
On that cheerful note, Dr Fuller heads out into my polluted street, presumably breathing a sigh of relief he is no longer in my deathtrap of a home. I, meanwhile, blow out all the candles, open the windows, turn the heating off, and consider how on earth I can reverse 27 years of damage.
The Invisible Killer: The Rising Global Threat of Air Pollution - and How We Can Fight Back by Gary Fuller published by Melville House UK RRP £12.99. Buy now for £10.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
Follow the link to discover the 5 ways to cut your exposure to air pollution and boost your health