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Los Angeles District Councilmember Kevin de León recently introduced a motion proposing a program titled "Park Blocks," modeled after Barcelona’s Superblock initiative, which would establish usable public space for pedestrians and cyclists by closing certain streets to motorized... View full entry
The New York State Assembly and Senate have passed a bill barring the construction of schools within 500 feet of a highway. The Schools Impact by Gross Highways Act (or SIGH Act) was written to protect school-age children from air pollution. Under the bill, which will also apply to New York City... View full entry
The second most valuable company in the world, Amazon has been gobbling up space throughout the southeast corner of the city, taking advantage of zoning meant to preserve blue-collar jobs in a market in which housing and office space have typically generated higher revenues. — The San Francisco Chronicle
Amazon bought a 510,000-square-foot former sanitation motor pool parcel in the Showplace Square section of the city for $200 million in December of 2020. It has since proposed an expansion of the site’s footprint into an over 725,000-square-foot distribution hub for 400 workers that neighboring... View full entry
In California’s Inland Empire, dozens of mega-warehouses for Amazon, UPS and other companies are choking the cities with traffic and air pollution. Some argue that the jobs warehouses provide aren’t worth the cost, while others say it’s online shopping that’s the real problem. — Los Angeles Times
Despite the boiler-plate promise of adding jobs to the community, warehouse-laden tracts have been dumping an increasing amount of pollutants into the atmosphere in the form of increased truck and air cargo traffic and propelled in part by a sharp rise in online shopping. Amazon opened its... View full entry
In an effort to track the impacts, Earther assembled an interactive map to explore the changes in air pollution not just in the U.S. but globally. The map runs on Google Earth Engine and uses data collected by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite, which circles the Earth capturing various types of data. It includes four snapshots from December 2019 through March 20, 2020. The Sentinel satellite data shows nitrogen dioxide, which is a handy proxy for human activity. — Gizmodo
Brian Kahn and Dhruv Mehrotra of Earther highlight a recently launched pollution visualizer their team has assembled that highlights the stark changes in human activity across the world in the wake of COVID-19-imposed economic and social disruptions. The authors interview Barbara Dix... View full entry
Canberra has experienced its worst air quality on record, as bushfire smoke became trapped by atmospheric conditions and residents were told to stay indoors and brace for more smog in the coming days.
The ACT’s acting chief health officer, Dr Paul Dugdale, said the smoke was the worst since the 2003 bushfires and was “certainly the worst” since air quality monitoring started in the city 15 years ago.
— The Guardian
According to The Guardian’s reporting, Air Quality Index (AQI) readings in Canberra city reached 3,463 on Wednesday afternoon, with readings above 200 considered to be hazardous. According to reports, the fires have burned at least 14.6 million acres around the country so far with... View full entry
The samples he collects will help scientists better understand how the massive increase in seasonal wildfires burning through residential areas might be affecting our health. Where smoke once contained the remnants of only biomass (trees and other organic matter), fires are now burning up homes—structures that contain thousands of synthetic chemicals, paints, plastics, and metals that smolder and combust into tiny particles. — National Geographic
Air pollution worsened in the United States in 2017 and 2018, new data shows, a reversal after years of sustained improvement with significant implications for public health.
In 2018 alone, eroding air quality was linked to nearly 10,000 additional deaths in the U.S. relative to the 2016 benchmark, the year in which small-particle pollution reached a two-decade low, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
— The Washington Post
The Washington Post reports that "concentrations of the pollutant have risen about 5.5 percent since 2016," and points out several contributing factors that the Carnegie Mellon study identified: increased natural gas use and vehicle traffic, risen severity and frequency of wildfires, and the... View full entry
In the height of daytime, the sky suddenly blackened, and day became night in Sao Paulo.
Sure, smog is bad in the Western Hemisphere’s largest city, where traffic jams can stretch for dozens of miles. But not this bad. What was going on? Was the end near?
— The Washington Post
A combination of meteorological events paired with smoke that had traveled hundreds of miles from intense forest fires in remote parts of the Amazon caused a period of sudden midday darkness in the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere on Monday, reports The Washington Post. Meanwhile on... View full entry
Cars and trucks on one of Europe’s most notoriously congested and polluted urban highways would not only be obliged to drive more slowly, they’d have less room to do it: The number of beltway lanes open to all traffic would also be slashed from eight to six. One lane will be reserved for public, emergency, and zero-emissions vehicles. The other one is to be devoted to trees. — CityLab
Paris officials are making plans to redesign the traffic lanes for the city's 22-mile-long ring road, Boulevard Périphérique. A recent report calls for retrofitting the eight-lane highway as part of a wider effort to crack down on car usage across the city. Since taking office in 2014, Paris... View full entry
A colourful mural of a 35m-tall tree in Mexico City is one of three environmentally friendly new public works made using Airlite paint, which purifies polluted air in a process similar to photosynthesis.
[...] the mural aims to increase oxygen levels in one of the western hemisphere’s most polluted cities, where ozone concentration levels remain high despite government regulations on fuel and cars.
— The Art Newspaper
Image courtesy of Boa Mistura."Airlite paint chemically reacts with pollutants in the air, turning them into inert compounds," reports The Art Newspaper. "The roughly 1,000 sq. m mural should neutralise the same amount of pollution created by around 60,000 vehicles a year."The artists responsible... View full entry
For 20 years, the American Lung Association has gathered and analyzed data from official air quality monitors creating its annual "State of the Air" report. It's been reported by the association that more than four in ten people currently live in areas where pollution levels are too dangerous to... View full entry
House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry—was the world’s first large-scale collaborative investigation into the chemistry of indoor air. [...] The experiment’s early results are just now emerging, and they seem to show that the combined emissions of humans and their daily activities—cooking, cleaning, metabolizing—are more interesting, and potentially more lethal, than anyone had imagined. — The New Yorker
In this New Yorker piece, writer Nicola Twilley observes one of the experiments of HOMEChem, who investigates the atmospheric chemistry of our indoor environments and how everyday activities can greatly affect its air quality. “Dozens of the chemicals measured by the HOMEchem team are known to... View full entry
Shit, I Smoke! was created by Brazilian-born designer Marcelo Coelho and Paris-born app developer Amaury Martiny in just a week, after they read a study that analyzed air pollution and its equivalent to cigarette smoking. [...] Using the formula in [the study], [the app] uses live pollution data from hundreds of air quality stations in cities around the globe and converts the station’s PM2.5 number into the number of cigarettes being inhaled by a person in real time. — Citylab
“For both Coelho and Martiny, the app isn’t only a useful tool to inform users about their city’s air quality; it also makes this information more accessible and easier to comprehend.” View full entry
An experimental tower over 100 metres (328 feet) high in northern China – dubbed the world’s biggest air purifier by its operators – has brought a noticeable improvement in air quality, according to the scientist leading the project, as authorities seek ways to tackle the nation’s chronic smog problem. [...]
The head of the research, Cao Junji, said improvements in air quality had been observed over an area of 10 square kilometres (3.86 square miles) in the city over the past few months [...].
— South China Morning Post
Now that the experimental smog-eating tower is up and running in the city of Xian, authorities are hoping to build much bigger, scaled-up versions in other Chinese cities soon: "A full-sized tower would reach 500 metres (1,640 feet) high with a diameter of 200 metres (656 feet)," the South China... View full entry
