We’ve never been more aware of our breath. It’s in the suck and billow of our masks, the fogging of glasses, as we keep ourselves to ourselves. Will we ever look at packed sweaty rooms and not think about the air filling with aerosol droplets of virus?
Our carbon footprint is not a footprint at all. It’s a bubble. There is nothing earth-bound about our emissions. Would that they were in the soil, where they belong. But they are airborne.
There are other things that harm us in the air. One of them is nitrogen dioxide, a gas produced when the fuel in cars, vans and trucks is burned. Diesel engines are the worst polluters. NO2 is the noxious ingredient that keeps on giving. It can react with other chemicals to form soot, or fine particulate matter, measured according to size. PM2.5 is so called because the particles measure just 2.5 microns (a human air measures about 50 microns). These are tiny enough to enter our bodies through our lungs, causing stroke, heart disease, lung cancer and respiratory infections. One in nine deaths in the world is attributed by the World Health Organisation to air pollution.
Solutions
Knowing how polluted air is can give urban communities better ideas for transport solutions. If you’re wondering how much traffic is polluting your neighbourhood, a citizen science project to measure air pollution in Dublin by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with An Taisce needs you. The Clean Air Together Project is recruiting 1,000 people who live in Dublin. You need to have a street-facing window – it can be where you live or work – and you will stick a small crayon-sized tube to the outside on the same day as the 999 other citizen scientists. The idea is based on the delightfully named Curious Noses project in Belgium.
“The tube will measure the levels of nitrogen dioxide – without you even knowing that it is there,” the EPA said. “After the four weeks, you will post the tube back to the EPA free of charge. Your tube will be sent for analysis and you will get a copy of your results.” These will then be mapped to show the state of Dublin’s air across a wide area of the city.
Sign up at cleanairtogether.ie. There's also the option of buying an air quality monitor to carry around. The Atmotube Pro (atmotube.com) can be clipped to a backpack and linked to a phone app to measure the quality of indoor and outdoor air everywhere you go. Take one of these on a walk in your nearest tree-populated park and you might begin to appreciate the difference trees make to the air that we breathe.
Catherine Cleary is the cofounder of Pocket Forests
