Air pollution
Last updated: November 17, 2009.
From cigarette smoke to global warming, air pollution has
many different causes and affects us in many different ways. Pause a
moment to make a list of all the different types of air pollution
you come across in a single day and you might be surprised. How
about car exhausts or garden bonfires, rotting food on landfills,
forest fires caused by accident or arson, or fumes from factories?
Photo: Air pollution pouring from a smokestack
(chimney). Photo by courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service.
What is pollution?
Photo: The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica caused by CFC pollution.
Picture courtesy of NASA.
If you can smell it and you don't like it, it's probably
pollution. But a bad smell may be the least of your worries. An
awful lot of pollution is highly toxic and harmful to health. (Did
you know, for example, that garden bonfire smoke contains over 350
times as much of the cancer-causing chemical benzpyrene as cigarette
smoke?)
Over time, the chemicals in pollution can accumulate in the
food chain or inside your body, so even if you're exposed for only a
short time the risk can be significant. Maybe you think air
pollution is nothing to worry about because the wind disperses it
quickly and blows it away. Sometimes that's true. But air pollution
can dissolve in rain and return to Earth as water pollution in another state,
country,
or even continent from where it was produced. Nothing illustrated
this more dramatically than the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear
power plant in the Ukraine in 1986, which blew a cloud of
radioactive fallout over much of western Europe.
How to tackle a project on pollution
This page is a collection of Web links designed to help you if
you're doing a school or college project into air pollution. The
best way to approach your research is to consider air pollution in a
very systematic way:
-
You could start by thinking about the different
causes of air pollution and the different types of pollution
that
each one produces.
- Next, maybe you could look at the actual chemicals
involved and the effects they have on human health.
(Incinerators
that dispose of household trash, for example, are often considered
controversial because if they don't burn at high enough temperatures
they can generate toxic chemicals called dioxins.)
-
Then you could move onto thinking about the different effects
pollution has on the
natural environment—on plants, animals, and people.
-
Finally, you need to think about some solutions to the
pollution problem. Is the best
approach to use laws? If so, how do you establish who's responsible
for pollution when the effects may show up a long way from the
cause—maybe even a long time afterwards? And how do you tackle
pollution at an international or global level? What do you do about
pollution produced in one country that can affect countries on the
other side of the world? Maybe you'll conclude that the best
solution is to raise public awareness of the problem so more people
change their behavior. Or maybe you'll decide politicians need to
regulate industry more—but how will that happen in a world where
businesses pull the strings of power? Are there any easy things we
can all do as individuals to reduce the problem of air pollution?
For example, could we shun plastic
packaging to reduce the amount of
trash that has to be burned? Could we switch to biodegradable plastics? How much
difference would it make if
everyone recycled more?
Links for further research
Cool stuff for schools!
A lot of the information on this page is quite detailed
scientific stuff. If you're doing a project for school, you might not
have time to work through all these zillions of links. We suggest you
take a look at the links below - you will probably find everything you
need for your project right here!
For younger students
For older students and general readers
Lesson plans and materials designed specifically for teachers
Government agencies and international
organizations
- United States and Canada:
- UK and Ireland:
- European Union:
- Other nations:
Not all pollution is human caused.
Find out more about pollution that is produced naturally in these
links:
- General:
- Chernobyl:
- US atomic tests:
- Risks of nuclear terrorism:
- Toxic
air pollutants: The US EPA's web pages about the toxic chemicals in
air pollution.
- Pollutants: Information from Environment Canada.
Covers Criteria Air Contaminants and related pollutants (e.g. SO2, NOx,
Volatile Organic Compounds, etc), Persistent Organic Pollutants
(POPs)(e.g. dioxins and furans), Heavy Metals (e.g. mercury, and other
toxics
- Taking
toxics out of the air: A detailed brochure published by the US EPA.
- Particles and particulates: A handy table of the
different particles from Environmental Protection UK.
- Scorecard: The
Pollution Information Site: Information and statistics about
polluting companies in the United States.
- Volatile
organic compounds: Sources of indoor air pollution; information
from the US EPA.
- Volatile
organic compounds: Background information from California's Indoor
Air Quality Program.
- Common indoor air pollutants: A 2004 article from
the San Francisco Chronicle.
- Toxic products in the home: A report from the
National Environment Trust.
- Heavy metals: Information from UNEP.
- Persistent organic pollutants (POPs): Background
information from UNEP.
- Six Common Air Pollutants: The US EPA describes the major air pollutants: Ozone, Particulate Matter,
Carbon Monoxide, Nitrogen Oxides, Sulfur Dioxide, and Lead.
- Indoor
air quality: A short introduction from Wikipedia.
- Indoor air quality:
A FAQ from the US Environmental Protection Agency.
- Medline: Indoor Air Pollution: A collection of links
from the US National Library of Medicine.
- World
Health Organization: Indoor Air Pollution: How big is the problem
worldwide and what can we do about it?
- California Indoor
Air Quality Program: Information about a variety of subjects
including asthma, mold, tobacco smoke, asbestos, volatile organic
compounds (VOCs), and radon.
- How dishwashers pollute the indoor air: Science
News, 1999
- House Beautiful, House Breathable: Health
information from the American Association for Respiratory Care.
- World Health Organization: Percentage of population
using solid fuels indoors:
- Indoor
air quality tools for schools: From the US EPA. "The Indoor Air
Quality Tools for Schools (IAQ TfS) Kit shows schools how to carry out
a practical plan of action to improve indoor air problems at little or
no cost using straightforward activities and in-house staff."
- US
Consumer Product Safety Commission: lots of useful background
reports about home hazards like paint strippers, carpet chemicals, room
humidifiers, etc.
These handy links will automatically check news
archives for recent air pollution stories in the news.
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