“Watching a family member struggle to breathe properly because of the actions of my neighbours is not something I should have to deal with." This moving line appeared in a letter letter to a Canadian newspaper and the problem came from nearby wood stoves and home fires. The writer, Colin Oakes, explained exactly what he thought of the people that live around him, “Burning wood, with all of its known health risks, is tantamount to assault on members of the community.”
Are we finally waking up to the damage that air pollution causes? In years to come will polluting our air be thought of in way as we think of plastic waste, passive smoking or drink driving?
So, what are the alternatives for a warm but less polluting and less polluted house? New wood stoves that meet the latest standards are one option. These are very different to open fires or the stoves of old and are carefully engineered to introduce air into different parts of the flame to burn away the smoke. However, even the stoves that meet the newest European Ecodesign standards can still emit the same particle pollution as six modern lorries. Clearly it would not be acceptable to drive six lorries in your street all evening; neighbours would be rightly up in arms.
New gas boilers exist that come with low pollution burners and heat pumps that work like fridges in reverse. These produce far less particle pollution than wood. The best systems now learn how the outside cold affects your house to optimise energy use, save you money and reduce climate change emissions. You can control them from your mobile phone and can have a warm house when you arrive home.
Around London parents and teachers are becoming concerned about air pollution near schools. Those that can afford it are moving to less polluted areas moving to less polluted areas. There's also increasing social pressure against drivers zooming past schools and parents driving their diesel cars to do the daily drop-off. In a recent survey 80 per cent of respondents supported a ban on diesel cars close to schools.
To protect the children, barriers will be closed each day on the roads around four primary schools in Greenwich. In these densely populated areas most children live within easy walking distance of their school. Walking your child to school can be fun: as a parent, I renewed my skills at hop-scotch, avoiding the cracks in the pavement and playing counting games as we tallied up the number of lamp posts and red front doors that we passed.
Modern air pollution is largely invisible. This means that it can be difficult to measure. It's even more difficult to pick the least polluted walking route to school. There are now many portable sensors that you can carry and read the results on a screen or on your phone.
But buyer beware. Normally, technology gets created in university laboratories and forged in the heat of peer review science and only the best are commercialised. Small air pollution sensor development has been different. Technology start-ups build devices for sale direct to the public, missing out the independent evaluation. It is uncertain if these small sensors will flood people with questionable data or if they will achieve their promise, allowing people to sense the invisible air pollution around them.
Setting aside personal sensors, a good start for a low pollution route to school, or anywhere else, is simply to avoid the traffic. If you live in London or Paris, then you can do much better. Both cities produce maps of real-time air pollution which you can view on your phone, so each day you can see which roads are the most polluted and choose which way to go.
Signs for low pollution walking routes are also appearing in London. Each day thousands of people walk between King’s Cross, St Pancras and Euston stations. This is less than a kilometre. Most people walk along the busy Euston Road and share their air with the 60,000 buses, lorries and cars that pass every day. But follow the new signs and walk along a back road and you can halve the pollution that you breathe. New routes are connecting useful places like tube stations to shops and theatre. They could help near schools too.
Read more: This London bench absorbs as much pollution as 275 trees
Across Europe attitudes to diesel have completely changed. UK sales of diesel cars have plummeted from half of new cars in 2015 to less than a quarter now. These cars were initially sold as low carbon, but are now viewed as an air pollution menace. Local councils are reflecting this change of mood and have begun to charge extra for parking diesel cars and some cities are charging drivers of older diesel cars to drive on the streets. A steady drip feed of revelations about exhaust tests has eroded trust.
When buying a car it is impossible to see which are really the least polluting. Around five years ago, air quality expert Nick Molden and friends started hiring cars and strapping equipment to the back to measure the exhaust while they drove around. They then put the data on-line. Until this time the only people with this data were the manufacturers, and they did not share. Molden’s website now rates the exhausts of over 1,600 different cars and vans. Petrol hybrids and petrol cars do best, and are often better than the legal standards require. The worst diesel cars tested in 2017 produced 32 times more nitrogen oxides than the best ones. So, it not only matters if you drive a diesel or not, but which one.
However, the best way to reduce the air pollution from your car is to leave it at home. The bicycle is now the most popular vehicle during rush hour in the City of London. One quarter of road journeys in England are less than three kilometres and, when accounting for the time taken to park, it's actually faster to walk or cycle in most cases. In a smog-free city, a well-used bicycle or a pair of worn shoes might become the new symbols of positive action.
*Gary Fuller is an air pollution scientist at King’s College London. His new book,*The Invisible Killer: The Rising Global Threat of Air Pollution – and How We Can Fight Back, is out now.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
