iPM Plus
Accurately Measuring Size Fractions Through Light
Turnkey’s new iPM Particle Monitor instrument employs a unique combination of light extinction and light scatter to size individual airborne particles independently of their refractive index. This allows the instrument to simultaneously measure all the PM size fractions with great accuracy. iPM has also achieved the Environment Agency’s MCERTS certification.
Measure TSP, PM10, PM2.5 and PM1 simultaneously
Data sent to Turnkey’s cloud server
Particle spectrometer to measure particle size distribution between 0.2 and 10 micron
Ideal for measuring diesel fume pollution
Interchangeable GF/B filter capsule
Calibrated with mono-disperse spheres
Welcome to Air Quality News Magazine – Issue 27.
Contacts
Publisher:
David Harrison
E: d.harrison@spacehouse.co.uk
T: 01625 614 000
Editor:
Paul Day
E: paul@spacehouse.co.uk
T: 01625 614 000
Design & Layout:
Oli Bowden
E: design@spacehouse.co.uk
T: 01625 614 000
Business Development Manager: Andy Lees
E: a.lees@spacehouse.co.uk
T: 07843 632609
Air Quality News Magazine published by Spacehouse Ltd Pierce House, Pierce Street Macclesfield SK11 6EX
Contact
T: 01625 614 000
E: hello@spacehouse.co.uk
All rights reserved. Reproduction, in whole or part without written permission is strictly prohibited.
The fact that the last Air Quality News magazine of the year is traditionally launched at our National Air Quality Conference in London always makes it a special one.
Sometimes there is an editorial connection between the magazine and the conference and in this instance that lies with the new EPIC guidance on air quality and climate change. Within these pages Alaric Lester explains how the guidance can be used by anyone in local authority whose work can impact emissions - or be impacted by emissions. At the conference, Sara Legge, Chair of EPIC’s Task Group on Air Quality and Climate Change Guidance, will unpack the guidance even further.
In October last year, four London Boroughs launched Air Aware, an air quality information tool designed for public use. Hackney’s Dave Trew talks us through its inception, its development and what the future holds for it.
In our last magazine we featured the tragic story of David Bolton who for years struggled to breathe because of woodburning in his neighbourhood. In this issue, Tim Williamson, Technical Director at Air Quality Consultants looks at the size of the problem across Europe and considers how it might be tackled.
As the magazine is published on 6th November, Emily Whitehouse has spoken to Dr Jim McQuaid, from the University of Leeds about the fallout from firework displays. She also speaks to a company who are reaping the benefits of the trend to use drones, rather than fireworks, for spectacular light shows.
After examining the requirements of a special effects company in the last issue, Simon Guerrier again delves into the realms of niche air quality requirements by looking at how The Borthwick Institute for Archives monitors air quality to protect thousands of precious old documents.
Our Big Interview this issue is with a big name: Dr Gary Fuller, one of the UK’s most prominent communicators around air pollution and the science that’s addressing it. We hear how the Breathe:2022 art project in London has resurfaced thousands of miles away as Breathe:Lahore. Artist Dryden Goodwin and campaigner Abid Omar talk about the project.
It is only recently that microplastics have begun to be considered an air quality issue and here, Martin Guttridge-Hewitt explains exactly why that is.
Finally, I talk to Prof. Greg Marsden from the Institute for Transport Studies about a major new project that aims to work with the public to understand what a city would need to offer in order for them to consider living without a car.
Paul Day | Editor
Clean Air Zones
Cycling and Walking
and FUSION
EV Charging
Uniting what’s next in traffic.
We are connecting the dots of a new mobility revolution that is transforming our towns and cities.
With the broadest end-to-end portfolio of intelligent traffic management solutions, we work with cities, highway authorities and mobility
operators to make their road networks and fleets intelligent, enhance road safety and improve air quality.
time to make the world a better place. We are ready. Are you?
Contents
PAGES 6-7
News
Legal action underway against council over illegal landfill.
PAGES 16-17
Air quality’s old-new problem
Possible solutions to Europe’s wood burning habit.
PAGES 26-29
The Big Interview
We speak to Gary Fuller, one of the UK’s three Clean Air Champions.
PAGES 38-39
Microplastics
Looking at microplastics as an air quality problem.
PAGES 10-11
Air in the archive
Controlling air quality to protect a precious collection of documents.
PAGES 18-20
INFUZE: Reducing car ownership
A collaborative approach to reducing car ownership.
PAGES 30-32
International
Art, activism and the fight to tackle air pollution in Pakistan and beyond.
PAGES 40-42
The success of Air Aware
How community involvement led to the success of an air quality tool.
PAGES 12-14
The dangers of bonfire night
A timely look at the impact of fireworks on our air quality.
PAGES 21-24
Air Quality Conference
The delegate programme for the National Air Quality Conference.
PAGES 34-36
Local Authority
New EPIC guidance on air quality and climate change.
PAGE 43
Coming soon
2025 Northern Air Quality Conference, 25th March, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester.
Legal action underway against council over illegal landfill
Ruth Kettle-Frisby, co-founder of Clear The Air In Havering has officially filed a claim against Havering Council over an illegal landfill site at Launders Lane, Rainham.
A survey carried out in 2011 described the site as a potential threat to health but it has taken the Council until July this year to decide that the site need not be designated as contaminated.
This is key because, as legal firm Mishcon de Reya point out, had the site been designated as contaminated, then the council and the Environment Agency would have a legal duty to ensure the site was cleaned up, and would have the power to undertake the work themselves should the owner of the land refuse.
Emily Nicholson, partner at Mishcon de Reya, said: ‘We believe that there are strong grounds to challenge the council’s decision not to designate the land as contaminated: that the council failed to take into account a number of significant factors, relied on flawed data and inconclusive evidence and didn’t properly consider the impact on the physical and mental health of local residents.’
Ruth Kettle-Frisby added: ‘The council will not be able to ignore this legal challenge and must face up to the reality of this dire situation and take responsibility where it’s due.
‘If our claim is successful, the council will have to remake their decision on whether the land is contaminated or not based on a much more thorough and comprehensive assessment of the
evidence and risks of the toxic air pollution from the fires to the health and safety of local residents based on correct data.
‘Rainham is one of the most deprived areas of London and is a dumping ground for developments such as quarries that directly and indirectly pollute the air, however it is my conviction that clean air should be a human right; not a privilege that is dependent on where you live. Rainham children - especially those with existing health conditions and disabilities - are living at the sharp end of this crisis.’
Air pollution episodes see rise in emergency department admissions
New research has revealed a link between increased levels of particulate matter and an increase in the number of patients attending hospital emergency departments.
This correlation persisted even when pollution levels were within World Health Organization guidelines.
The researchers examined data on 307,279 patient visits to the emergency department at Careggi University Hospital in Florence between 2019 and 2022.
This was compared with the daily levels of PM2.5 and PM10 near patients’ home addresses for up to 30 days before they went to hospital.
They found that within a few days of an increase in the level of air pollution, there was an increase of between 10-15% in the number of patients admitted to the hospital’s emergency department.
An increase in the number of trauma cases and patients with breathing difficulties and skin conditions was particularly evident.
The rise in trauma cases was more notable in younger patients, while those over 65 were more likely to present with breathing difficulties.
Dr Andrea Rossetto an emergency medicine resident at University of Florence and Careggi University Hospital in Italy said: ‘We know that air pollution is damaging for health, especially in terms of breathing and lung diseases, and this is likely to have an impact on our health services. However, there is limited evidence on the impact of fluctuations in air pollution on the overall workload in the emergency department.
‘At our hospital most trauma patients have been involved in road traffic collisions. Traffic is also a primary driver of increased air pollution in urban areas. It is likely that heavy traffic is directly responsible for the increase in trauma cases and indirectly for more patients presenting with breathing difficulties linked to air pollution.
‘This means we’re seeing more patients with breathing difficulties at a time when the emergency department is already under stress with more trauma cases, with potentially worse outcomes for such patients.’
Outrage as Shell and Tesco carve up the entire output of UK’s largest solar site
Tesco has secured 65% of the solar power generation from Cleve Hill Solar Park, the largest solar and battery storage project ever constructed in the UK, with Shell acquiring the remaining 35%.
The site will have a capacity of 373 megawatts, generated by 560,000 solar panels. It was explained to residents campaigning against its construction that it would be capable of supplying energy to 100,000 homes. The news of the Tesco and Shell deals means that the site will not actually be supplying energy to any homes at all.
Marie King of the Graveney Rural Environment Action Team said: ‘The whole idea of it was that it was going to go towards powering homes not two very large businesses. They had an open day last month where we were able to go to the site and they did a presentation there and they were still talking about powering homes.
‘Well, clearly this deal has been in the making for some considerable time but they were telling us that it would into the nation grid. For them to sell to Shell, this proves that this is not a green development at all. From a local community perspective the feeling is anger.’
Shell have been responsible for 2.1% of global CO2 emissions since 1854.
Funding for fossil fuel projects overtakes that for air quality schemes
The Clean Air Fund have published their annual The State of Global Air Quality Funding report, which last year brought the welcome news that funding from governments, agencies and development banks for outdoor air quality projects exceeded funding for fossil fuel projects for the first time.
The sums being $2.3 billion as compared to $1.5 billion.
This year’s report reveals an astonishing reversal in that progress, with funding for fossil fuel projects soaring to $5.4 billion.
Jane Burston, CEO of the Clean Air Fund, said: ‘This shocking increase in aid funding to fossil fuels is a wake-up call. The world cannot continue down this path of propping up polluting practices at the expense of global health and climate stability. We need to see a drastic shift towards supporting clean air initiatives and debt-free aid to communities who need it most.’
The report also highlights the lopsided geographical distribution of funding, pointing out that over four years, the Philippines received three times more
funding than the whole of Africa and the Middle East combined.
Another concern is that 92% of recent funding has been delivered as loans, with only 6% being in the form of grants. This raises the danger that, with debt servicing costs expected to soar for the world’s poorest countries, they will be reluctant to take on more, particularly in areas such as air quality.
OTHER NEWS
Prashant Kumar receives Haagen-Smit Clean Air Award
The University of Surrey’s Professor Prashant Kumar has been awarded this year’s Haagen-Smit Clean Air Award by the California Air Resources Board for his work in the Education, Community Service, & Environmental Justice sector.
The awards have been an annual event since 2001 when Senator Byron Sher was recognised for his role in environmental policy, which included introducing the California Clean Air Act.
Mayor’s fund provides ‘game changing’ solar at the London Stadium
London Stadium is to have 6,500 m² of solar membrane panels installed on its roof, thanks to £4.35m from the Mayor of London’s £500m Green Finance Fund.
The panels will generate 850,000kWh a year when they become operational next summer, equivalent to the demands of the stadium’s typical annual schedule of around 20 football matches, four concerts, two Major League Baseball matches and an international athletics event.
British Library installing innovative solar heat system
The British Library is installing the UK’s largest solar heat project, using a hybrid solar collector, known as Virtu, which combines solar photovoltaics and solar thermal technology, to generate both electricity and heat from a single solar collector.
This can use the sun to heat water up to 120°C but the Library will also use it to help maintain the precise temperature and humidity conditions needed to preserve their collection.
For the full stories and more, visit: airqualitynews.com
Automated 24/7 monitoring
‘Always up’ self-healing wireless mesh network
Web based UI dashboards with analytics
Lifetime warranty
Vortex supports Cardiff Council with city-wide VTX Air network
Client. Cardiff City Council
Cardiff Council and Vortex have launched an ambitious project with forty-seven air quality monitors installed across four Air Quality Management Areas (AQMA) and twenty-six school locations in the Welsh capital.
The Welsh capital is committed to improving air quality for its 350,000+ residents, focussing on vulnerable areas like schools to protect children’s health.
Challenge. Lack of localised data
Like many UK cities, Cardiff faces significant air pollution issues, particularly Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions from road transport. Additionally, Public Health Wales estimates over 220 annual deaths in the region due to NO2 pollution. Legacy legal challenges have driven the Council to intensify efforts against air pollution in recent years.
• 2017 legal action: Client Earth sued the Welsh and UK Governments over illegal NO2 levels, pushing for accountability.
• Cardiff Council was instructed to find ways to reduce NO2 quickly. Initial findings showed Castle Street and other areas breaching EU limits by 2021.
• Traditionally, the Council relied on diffusion tubes, offering only average readings and limiting real-time assessment on a street-by-street basis.
Solution. VTX Air Monitors
In response to these challenges, Cardiff Council sought innovative solutions to enhance its air quality monitoring capabilities. Recognising the need for a holistic approach, the Council preferred noncharging measures over clean air zones, aligning with government guidance and emphasising the broader air quality benefits associated with such solutions. Vortex provided:
• VTX Air monitors across nearly every School and four Air Quality Management Areas: Llandaff, Ely Bridge, Stephenson-Court, Cardiff City Centre
• Real-time data on multiple pollutants: VTX Air Monitors provide street-level accuracy, measuring air particulates and gas pollutants every 5 minutes.
• Wireless network: Devices are SIM Card-free and connected wirelessly, enabling reliable end-to-end communication.
Outcome. Hyperlocal data on-demand
Vortex’s advanced tools allow Cardiff to compare local air pollution levels with AURN stations, offering deeper insights into pollution patterns. By deploying Vortex’s VTX Air monitors, Cardiff has been able to achieve the following:
• Identify NO2 concentration peaks around schools during peak traffic times, highlighting areas needing intervention.
• Raise awareness using real-time data to help policymakers, parents, and teachers understand and address air pollution risks.
By monitoring air quality around schools, the Council can validate the success of future projects, like enforced school streets, and encourage healthier, more sustainable transportation choices.
Air in the archive
By Simon Guerrier
The Borthwick Institute for Archives, in York, boasts thousands of precious old documents –and closely monitors air quality to hold back the ravages of time.
A huge, modern building outside York holds a treasure trove of the past. Church records reaching back to the 13th century, the local NHS archive and the papers of renowned chocolatiers
Rowntree’s and Terry’s are carefully stored alongside colonial history, natural history and the papers of leading figures in theatre, film and TV – from playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn to comedian Frankie Howerd. All of this needs to be diligently preserved, which means closely monitoring and controlling the air.
While air conditioning systems are usually installed to benefit the people inside a building, at the Borthwick the collections come first. ‘I suppose that is a bit weird,’ laughs Gary Brannan, Keeper of Archives and Research Collections. ‘When people book a slot in our reading room, we advise them to bring a jumper. Even then, we sometimes get complaints that it’s too cold… and we’re strangely popular in summer!
‘Records made on organic materials – such as paper or historic parchment – all require temperatures of 16°C to 17°C and 50%
to 55% humidity,’ Gary continues. ‘They degrade at different rates: 13th century parchment turns out to be much more durable than 20th century newsprint. Photographic materials such as glass slides, prints and negatives need cooler, drier conditions. Preservation really means managing the process of decline. You can’t stop or reverse something ageing but you can slow it right down. We call it “arresting the effects of time”.’
There are strict rules on how to conserve such cultural heritage, set out in British Standard BS EN 16893:2018. Indeed, Section 5.4 is all about air quality.
‘The main issue is that changes in temperature and humidity puts stress on the collections and speed up degradation,’ explains Gary. ‘Our building is designed to be thermally efficient, with a lot of thermal inertia, so we often have days where the temperature and humidity remain the same even without our air-handling kit coming on. We’re also continually logging conditions in our storage and research areas. Alerts go off if temperature or humidity are out of line.’
Temperature and humidity are not constant throughout the building, which presents practical challenges. ‘We have a special cold room for storing photographic material. If someone wants to view an item, it’s transferred to one of our strong rooms –but if you do that too quickly, there’s a risk of condensation building up, which will ruin an old, fragile photograph. It needs 24 hours in controlled conditions to slowly come up to strongroom temperature.’
Yet there are benefits from such variations. ‘I don’t think it was an intentional part of the design,’ says Gary, ‘but there is slightly higher air pressure inside the strong rooms than outside, which means a constant flow of air under the door. We find that helps keeps down dust because it’s simply blown out through the gap. It would also make it harder for any pests trying to get in.’
The designed features include being able to filter out external particulates from the air. ‘Our location outside the city means that isn’t often an issue. Sometimes, around Fireworks Night in the city, the smoke and particulates aren’t entirely filtered out of the air and our system will sound an alarm. That just shows how sensitive it all is.
A more pressing danger is mould. ‘That only needs a little warmth and wet, especially in spring and autumn. You can’t get rid of mould entirely but you keep it inactive with the right atmospheric conditions.’
Even so, care is taken to ensure that this isn’t an entirely sterile environment. ‘You can get important contextual information from the way different materials smell, which you don’t want to lose,’ says Gary. ‘The archive from a hospital will often have a whiff of soap, the records from Rowntree’s have a tang of stale chocolate and there are records related to individuals with a characteristic trace of pipe-smoke. That’s useful for checking if something’s authentic.
Is there any danger from the chemicals that such items release into the air? Gary laughs again. ‘There’s a well-known book among archivists, Dust – The Archive and Cultural History by Carolyn Kay Steedman (Rutgers University Press, 2001), which suggests we all go mad in the end because we’re always inhaling anthrax spores. I couldn’t possibly comment!
“ There’s a well-known book among archivists… which suggests we all go mad in the end because we’re always inhaling anthrax spores. I couldn’t possibly comment!”
Gary Brannan Keeper of Archives and Research Collections
We’ve been thinking about installing detectors for volatile organic compounds (VOCs), though they’d probably be in trace amounts given the size of our rooms. But we’re always on the look-out for particular volatile chemicals.
‘Most archivists are very attuned to smells as early warnings, just like you might smell smoke and think “fire”. The ageing process releases certain chemicals: the slightly vanilla scent you get from old books is caused by the breakdown of a chemical called lignin in the wood pulp when exposed to air. It turns the paper yellow, too. We control conditions here in such a way that you don’t often get that smell from any of our items – but we’re alert for it.
‘The smell of vinegar, like a chip shop, is an important warning that film stock has begun to break down and needs urgent attention. And we check old cans of film to see if they’re marked “N” for nitrate, which was also used in old photograph albums as a covering for photos. You can be thrilled to find some rare, lost film or lovely looking picture album from the 1920s – but it’s literally explosive!’ The building has, of course, been designed with fire safety in mind.
What about the other way round – do people in the building pose a threat to the collection? ‘Our stores are so big that you need a lot of people in there to affect the humidity, but we can see from environmental monitoring the effect of a large tour group in our strong rooms. The automated systems respond to that as needed.’ What about in handling documents? ‘Really, the damage we try to guard against is mechanical, such as someone accidentally tearing a page. If we’re worried that breathing on a particular document might damage it, we wouldn’t have it out for handling.’
What else could the Borthwick be doing? ‘If budgets and technology could bend to my will, it would be useful to have differing temperatures and humidities in different parts of the same strong room. At the moment, we need a separate room for photographs.
‘More realistically, a richer network of monitoring points would help us better understand what the air is doing. We already take spot readings and move data loggers around to get a better picture. But, for example, our shelves automatically space themselves apart each night at 7pm to get some airflow capacity around them. If the air only comes in from one point in the room, the shelves nearest that point will get more airflow. I’d like to understand that kind of thing better and what can be done to even things out.’
That’s a thought, isn’t it? The more we understand air quality, the better we’re equipped to arrest the effects of time…
Borthwick Strongroom
Toxic cocktails: Examining the dangers of bonfire night
By Emily Whitehouse
Firework and bonfire displays are breeding grounds for air pollutants, yet we choose to expose ourselves to them every year. Dr Jim McQuaid, from the University of Leeds, tells us how we can stay safe.
How do fireworks create beautiful explosions in the sky?
Probably not a question many people are asking themselves while gathered in a local park or field, sipping hot chocolate. Ahead of November fifth celebrations, warnings are issued for loud noises, potential harm to wildlife and advice is given about how to keep your pets safe. Yet it’s rare that we hear mention of a significant side-effect of such displays – the quality of the air.
There are few people more qualified to discuss the detrimental effects of bonfire night than Dr Jim McQuaid, who has worked as an Associate Professor of Atmospheric Composition at the University of Leeds since 2017.
‘Fireworks are far from impressive. They only look grand because they’re burning a number of different metals, a bit like a toxic cocktail’ Dr McQuaid explains. ‘Components such as strontium, chromium and copper can be found in fireworks and depending on which metal is burned, these are what create the different colours we see light up the sky.’
‘However, the dangers don’t come from the immediate reaction, it’s what lingers afterwards that’s a cause for concern,’ Dr McQuaid continues. ‘Cast your mind back to around six weeks ago when the news was filled with beautiful weather pictures of sunsets and sunrises, it was the blood moon that came as a result of the Canadian wildfires. Here, people should
have been concerned about how far toxins from fire can travel. Tiny particles can be lifted up by gravity and turbulence which is one of the major concerns with bonfire night.
‘Fireworks cause huge spikes in PM levels, and these don’t just disappear once displays have ended – it’s even worse if bonfire night falls on a weekday because the celebration turns into a week-long affair,’ Dr McQuaid explains.
A separate study conducted by the University of Leeds, which were published in 2020, highlight just how bad pollution levels can get. During 2016 and 2017 a group of academics planted air filters around the city on November 5th and found that soot –or black carbon – in the atmosphere was around 100 times higher than normal.
‘Black carbon particles are miniscule, meaning they can easily be breathed in and cause serious lung irritation,’ Dr McQuaid says. ‘In even worse cases, long-term exposure to them can cause heart problems, showing that the effects of firework displays are about more than nitrogen dioxide levels exacerbating breathing problems.’
Though there isn’t a huge amount, research into the dangers of fireworks seems to be evolving. However, there’s virtually nothing on bonfires – another big part of Guy Fawkes Night.
‘Fireworks are a global issue, but bonfires are much more UK centric,’ Dr McQuaid continues. ‘The most concerning factor is what is thrown onto them. Often, people assume that burning wood, as it’s a natural material, isn’t too bad but the wood used is usually untreated which can create a large surface area for burning and intensify flames. Around this time of year, people also use bonfires as a way of clearing out their homes. I’ve seen tyres, mattresses and rubbish bags that won’t fit in the wheelie bin chucked on them.’
Dr McQuaid adds: ‘One way around this would be attending council-controlled bonfires because they usually burn higher quality materials. However, since the pandemic – I can only really speak for Leeds – a lot of bonfire displays have been cancelled. The city’s display at Roundhay Park used to be quite something but it was permanently axed last year due to cost and air quality pressures.
‘Another solution, which could be more effective considering we live in England, is hoping for windy and rainy weather to hit after bonfire and firework displays have ended. These help to flush toxins out of the atmosphere.’
Greener alternatives
Alongside praying for bad weather and using better quality materials, an arguably better solution would be to ditch fireworks and switch to drones. The technologies can be used to create light shows in the sky – a method that has proven popular this year. Especially in Birmingham. For the first time, the city’s ‘Firework Spectacular at Edgbaston Stadium’ is being replaced by a drone light show, hosted by Celestial, an organisation that was founded by film director John Hopkins in 2020. Since its launch, the organisation has quickly gathered a reputation as one of the top drone show companies in the world and has hosted shows at a number of leading events. These include Glastonbury, Eurovision and London’s New Year’s Eve.
‘We’re a company dedicated to sustainably telling stories in the sky, which is something you can’t really do with fireworks,’ says Ottilie Culloty, Head of Global Marketing at Celestial. ‘This year we’ve noticed a huge interest in people wanting to switch to greener alternatives.’
And it’s not just for environmental reasons that people are being attracted to the new technology: ‘As well as our shows looking amazing, they don’t just disappear after a couple of seconds, we can actually hold an audience’s attention – especially children’s,’ Ottilie says. ‘Not only are our light shows a lot safer for people than fireworks displays, but we’ve also had a lot of praise from families who have children with special needs saying that our shows have been able to keep them entertained for longer periods.’
On the topic of popularity, the latest figures from the Civil Aviation Authority show that as of March 2023, there were over 500,000 active registered drone flyers and operators in the UK. Despite the increased uptake, people still have apprehensions around the technology, especially how durable they are in poor weather conditions. Recent studies have found that most drones can’t be flown in the rain as water can damage their electronic components and the cold weather can drain their battery life.
However, after being in the business for four successful years, Ottilie reassures us that Celestial’s drones rarely encounter such problems. She explains: ‘Our drones are increasingly weather agnostic and can withstand much of the adverse weather conditions that we have here in the UK.’
Against this backdrop, Ottilie also explains how Celestial have launched ticketed shows across the UK and that people have gone crazy for them. She says: ‘We’re putting on shows in seven stadiums across the UK including Cardiff, Bristol and Brighton. We have a festive Christmas Carol show coming up that’s narrated by Matt Lucas – I think he’s going to bring some real character to it - and that’s showing in three locations across the country this December.’
Although it’s unlikely we’ll see the back of fireworks anytime soon, for now, it’s encouraging enough that more people seem to be supporting sustainable replacements. Talking about the future, Ottilie says: ‘The reception we have received this year has just been exceptional so our biggest goal for 2025, in a way, is just to hope it continues, and people keep making the decision to explore options for safer, greener alternatives to fireworks.’
Celestial: New Year's Eve in London 2022
Celestial: Greenpeace Act Now 2022
Celestial: Samsung Galaxy S24 Launch 2024
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Burning wood for heat: Air quality’s old-new problem
By Tim Williamson, Technical Director, Air Quality Consultants Ltd
What could be more comforting than coming in from a cold and rainy day to a crackling log fire? In 2021, stove manufacturer Charnwood published a survey of their customers which extols the wellbeing benefits of having a log burning stove.
The vast majority of respondents felt that the stove enhanced their wellbeing, with “relaxation” and “homely atmosphere” being the highest scoring reasons. And it seems more and more people are, literally, buying into this idea, with 200,000 stoves sold in 2022 and no sign that demand is slackening, according to the Stove Industry Association. A Defra sponsored survey on Burning in UK homes and gardens, published in 2020, reported that 8% of homes in the UK regularly burned indoors, with wood being the most common fuel. Recent work undertaken by AQC, part of Logika Group, with Ipsos and Defra indicates that this figure is likely to have increased.
And yet…according to the UK’s National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory, the largest single source of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) emissions (29%) is domestic combustion, with wood burning being the largest component (for comparison, road traffic accounts for 11%). The UK is by no means an outlier: the European Commission’s 3rd Clean Air Outlook estimated that domestic combustion accounts for around half of PM2.5 emissions in the EU, and for the majority of Member States that means wood burning.
The health effects of air pollution have been well documented, but PM2.5 is the pollutant of greatest concern, linked to heart disease, COPD, cancer, dementia, diabetes and a host of other conditions. Public Health England have estimated that these impacts have an effect equivalent to 28,000-36,000 death per year in England alone, driven largely by particulate matter. The UK Government recently introduced new targets for PM2.5 in England, and the current WHO Guidelines are even lower.
The picture varies across different countries and regions in Europe. In some, especially in eastern Europe, solid fuel (wood and coal) is still an important primary heating source. However, for many northern and western European countries, a wood stove or fire is a secondary heating source, used either to boost the heat from the main, central heating system, or as an aesthetic addition. Architects and designers sometime refer to the concept of “thermal joy”, something which is particularly associated with radiant heat, such as a stove or fire. This, added to the sight and sounds of a log fire (even one enclosed in a stove – they have windows on the front for a reason), help create that sense of wellbeing referred to by the respondents to Charnwood’s survey. In the Defra survey, the most common reason given for burning indoors was “aesthetics”, and over 90% of those who burned had other forms of heating which they relied upon.
Bringing those figures together, in the UK, around a third of PM2.5 emissions are caused by 8% of the population, largely because log fires look nice. You might feel offended by the reductiveness of that sentence, and it is reductive. However, the fact remains that while we have accepted, and often demanded, controls on road vehicle tailpipe emissions, we, as a society, turn a blind eye to the more significant pollution source being installed in our front rooms.
To put this in perspective, the published EMEP emission factor for a log burning eco-stove is 93 g/GJ. This puts it on the same level as the emission limit for a Euro I HGV diesel engine, introduced over 30 years ago, at 100 g/GJ (0.36g/kWh). The current emission limit for HGV engines (Euro VI, since 2012)
is slightly less than 3 g/GJ, so around 30 times cleaner than a modern stove. However, a 30 year old HGV engine chugging away in your living room won’t create the same homely atmosphere.
The air pollution impacts of solid fuel heating are hardly new: the 1952 Great London Smog, which precipitated the passing of the first UK Clean Air Act in 1956, was simply the first smog event to be closely studied, and it wasn’t the last. However, the success of the Act in phasing out coal as a primary heat source in the UK was in large part due to its pushing against an open door. The general population was keen to stop relying on dirty, dangerous and inconvenient open fires and move to clean and convenient gas fires and, later, central heating. The new phenomenon is seeing households opting to spend (often) thousands of pounds to install a less convenient, less easy to use and more expensive (certainly if you purchase your kiln-dried nets of logs from the supermarket) and dirtier form of heating.
“ The fact remains that while we have accepted, and often demanded, controls on road vehicle tailpipe emissions, we, as a society, turn a blind eye to the more significant pollution source being installed in our front rooms!”
Tim Williamson Technical Director, Air Quality Consultants Ltd | Part of Logika Group
So, what is to be done? A recent study for the European Commission, led by Logika Group, looked at the measures in place in different Member States across the EU to control the air quality impact of “bioenergy”. These were overwhelmingly aimed at domestic scale wood combustion and measures were found in each country looked at. These fell into four broad categories:
• Operational controls, such as fuel quality regulations or maintenance requirements
• Stock upgrades, such as incentivising the sale of cleaner stoves or even replacing older stoves
• Restrictions on use, although these were usually tightly defined, in terms of the area they cover, the times they operate or the conditions for application (e.g. poor air quality days)
• Awareness raising, information or training
The first two of these, and most of the fourth, fall under the general term of “burn better”, that is reduce the emissions from the operation of the stove, fireplace or boiler, through more advanced appliances, better maintenance, cleaner fuels or a better understanding of what the air controls on a stove do. The third type equates to “burn less” and is especially applicable in urban areas where exposure to emissions is higher and alternative heating sources are more plentiful. Both burn better and burn less are necessary components in an overall strategy to address the air pollution impacts of wood burning, and the balance depends very much on the location, e.g. urban vs rural, and the available heating infrastructure.
A balance is also needed between measures that address consumers and those aimed at suppliers. This is especially important for wood fuel use: in the Defra survey, around a third of “burners” sourced their fuel through non-market means, whereas in France, sales of logs are thought to account for only 40% of the wood fuel used. Cultural drivers are also important: Germany has one of the most extensive ranges of measures on wood fuel and air quality but almost all are aimed at “burn better”. This reflects the fact that a quarter of households in Germany use a wood stove as a supplementary heating source, and the use of wood from community forests for fuel is deeply embedded in the culture in some areas. However, while the precise nature of the issue varies from country to country, there are examples of innovation and good practice which could be shared more widely. These include the emissions labelling schemes used as an incentive for cleaner stoves in several countries (Blue Angel, Nordic Swan, Green Flame, to name three), the use of chimney sweeps in Germany to given advice on what to burn and how to do it, the requirement to replace older stoves when selling a house in Denmark or the inclusion of domestic heating emissions in Sofia’s Low Emission Zone. In France, a national target has been set for reducing PM emissions from domestic heating (50% 2020-2030) and regions have been set the task of coming up with action plans to support this.
Smoke from home heating may not be a new issue, but we need new and innovative policy responses to address it in its modern form if we are to achieve the clean air goals to which the Governments of Europe aspire. In the UK, this means going beyond Smoke Control areas, which almost all local authorities find unenforceable, and the Domestic Solid Fuels Regulations, which only act on suppliers through the “formal” market. A real strategy is needed – do we favour burn better or burn less, how is the balance struck and what is the overall aim? Shouldn’t we be incentivising the very cleanest technology, including such abatement measures as electro-static precipitators, now rather than when the problem is even more intractable, or better yet encouraging the scrappage of old stoves? Should “aesthetic” burning be as tolerated as it currently is, given the health impact?
Whichever route we take, one size will not fit all, and safeguards will be needed to avoid pushing people into fuel poverty or making “skip diving” for fuel even more attractive (and thus making emissions worst as treated or contaminated wood is burned). We will be following up this paper with one looking at the socio-economics of both action and inaction on wood-burning. Either way, this is not a problem which is going away any time soon.
1 grams per billion Joules of energy produced. For reference, the emission factor for a gas boiler is 0.12 g/GJ, and for an open fire is 410 g/GJ. The current emission limit for a new HGV engine is equivalent to 2.8 g/GJ.
INFUZE: A collaborative approach to reducing car ownership
By Paul Day
An ambitious, five year project based in Leeds, is to consult with the public on designing a city in which car ownership would be unnecessary.
At the end of March, 2024, there were nearly 34 million cars registered in the UK. We recently reported that in Manchester, 28% of the city centre is given over to roads and a further 8% to car parks. And the number of cars in the UK is growing and that growth is expected to continue.
“We don’t have a solution to expand capacity to deal with that,” says Greg Marsden, Professor of Transport Governance at the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) at the University of Leeds.
“In some places pavement parking is endemic, we’ve got population growth, we’re not going to meet our climate targets even if we electrify. There’s all sorts of things that tell us that ‘carry on as we are’ won’t work.”
Greg is heading up a £7.8m project in Leeds known as INFUZE (Inspiring Futures for Zero Carbon Mobility) which aims to address the problem by asking people to rethink the way they get around.
Cars are a fundamental part of most people’s lives and given the kerfuffle over the ULEZ expansion, not to mention 20mph speed limits, LTNs and the impertinent intrusion of the cyclist, discussing cars in terms of being problematic is fraught with danger.
But the INFUZE project will come at it from a different angle. Nothing is being taken away and people aren’t even being
‘encouraged’ to change their behaviour. Instead, the team will ask communities across the city to help them design mobility solutions (car clubs, responsive taxi-style bus services and shared bicycle and scooter schemes) that they think might enable them to live car-free.
The five year project got under way in August and will eventually involve up to 400 households across the city. A call to action for suitable households will go out this month, households for which the project might represent a genuine opportunity.
RCA - LLM synthetic images
At the moment, Greg isn’t exactly sure where within the population interest is most likely to lie, and considers that one of the main challenges. He acknowledges that had the project taken place in London, it would be easy to find people who don’t feel they need to own a car, but that can’t be replicated in Leeds, hence the need to engage more deeply with a community slightly less willing to give up what they’ve got because, perversely, one of the downsides of car ownership, the cost, can also represent a barrier to change. ‘I’ve spent a fortune on this car, I’m not getting the bus!’
Research by Professor Jillian Anable, Greg’s colleague at the ITS, found that for around 20 to 25% of the population owning a car is very much a part of their identity and such people would be unlikely to engage with this sort project. But Greg believes that there are a number of reasons other people might be willing to explore ways of living without a car: “There are people on quite low incomes who feel they have to own a car in order to be able to participate in the labour market, even though they can’t afford a week’s holiday. So can we provide a solution that works for them?
“Then there are households that have two cars but maybe feel it’s quite an expense. ‘We’d rather just have one, but at the moment, because of all these synchronisation problems, we’ve got a busy family life… we’ve got two vehicles.’
“And there are places where there’s chronic over-demand for parking and actually owning a car’s a bit of a hassle.”
Aside from an enthusiasm within local communities to participate, locations chosen will also be based on the political support of the local ward councillors and the City Council along with the team’s data analytics which inform them of what might work well in different areas.
When the participants are assembled, INFUZE will explore their experiences of owning or not owning cars, and how that works for them in Leeds. What do they really rely on them for?
Greg has researched issues surrounding the design and implementation of new policies for over 20 years. He is an expert in climate and energy policy in the transport sector and the governance of smart mobility. He leads the Place theme in the national Energy Demand Research Centre and is Director of the INFUZE project which is exploring post car-ownership futures.
Professor Greg Marsden PhD. Meng, FCIHT, FHEA Professor of Transport Governance at the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds
What are the emotional or practical ties that hold them to owning a car at the moment?
“But then,” Greg says, “we want to move beyond that and show them some of the new sort of shared mobility platforms and services that are available. Essentially saying ‘Design a system for us that means you would be happy to give up your car.’”
No alternatives to using a car are off the table, as indicated by the list of partners associated with the project, with car share clubs, micromobility providers, bus companies and demandresponsive transport providers, all ready to be called upon.
“We’ve been deliberately open in our partnership formations,” explains Greg. “If you ask people nowadays about the prospect of not owning a car, what they would imagine is their local bus service or cycling and walking so one of the things that we feel is really important is that we communicate to people the range of different options that could be brought to bear.
RCA - LLM synthetic images
RCA - LLM synthetic images
“Some of it is working with employers on how they organise people getting to work, some of it’s provided by companies. I don’t think people know what they could be designing with. So that’s one reason for having such a broad sort of partners.”
Rather than simply banging a drum about saving the planet, the project will focus on real benefits to individuals and the broader community: on what their streets might look like with a third less cars, how the neighbourhoods might be regreened, how there might be space for more play areas.
By not approaching the project with any potential solutions, INFUZE is taking a different approach to resolving the car problem: it’s not starting with a solution. Trialling a potential solution and seeing how it performs is measurable, it can be seen to be a success or a failure. However, as this five year project enters its third month Greg admits, albeit with a certain satisfaction, that no-one knows how it will go: “We’ve been designing transport systems for decades and the trends are taking us away from where we should be going. So we don’t think that this is something that can be done to people, given to them and tested. It has to be designed by them and because of that we can’t say what the answer is going to look like.
“And that was quite uncomfortable as a funding process. It’s quite tricky for people to give you money when you’re saying, ‘I can tell you how we’ll approach it, but I can’t tell you what we’ll do.’”
For an environmentally motivated transport project, INFUZE is also possibly unique in having no interest in electrification. For one thing, in terms of meeting our climate goal targets, Greg believes it’s too late: “To get back on track with what the Committee on Climate Change says we need for the sixth carbon budget, you’d essentially need 10 years’ worth of behaviour change on a scale similar to the first year of the pandemic.”
Over and above this, is the fact that electrification may increase the number of cars on the road: “Electrification is making cars easier to drive,” Greg explains, “It’s also for many - if you have your own off street parking - making them cheaper to drive.
“That in itself risks building negative cycles around public transport because the alternative to public transport, the car, for many journeys is getting better.”
INFUZE’s ambition is that by Year Five the project will have accumulated evidence that there are certain kinds of communities who might be willing to move away from car ownership. And that they can build a tool kit that enables people or companies to go through this process and to understand how it could work in their location. “If we’ve been successful by then,” Greg says, “Year Five will be about expanding this to other places and trying to demonstrate this is not a niche in Leeds.”
INFUZE - PROJECT PARTNERS
• University of Leeds
• Lancaster University
• Royal College of Art
• Leeds City Council
• Department for Transport
• West Yorkshire Combined Authority
• Calderdale Council
• Transport for the North
• Transport for West Midlands
• Ahead Partnership
• Arup
• Steer
• Beryl
• Enterprise Car Club
• First Bus
• Padam Mobility
• Ridetandem
• Mobilityways
• Connected Places Catapult
• Zemo Partnership
• LeedsACTS!
• Third Sector Leeds
• Climate Action Leeds.
• Fore Consulting
6TH NOVEMBER, PROSPERO HOUSE, LONDON
1.
SIMON BIRKETT | Clean Air in London
Simon Birkett is the Founder and Director of Clean Air in London. He has championed full compliance with the World Health Organisation’s most recent air quality guidelines since 2006 to protect public health and the climate. Simon was the first and only air pollution stakeholder on UNEP’s High Level Inter-Governmental and Stakeholder Advisory Group for its Sixth Global Environment Outlook between 2015 and 2019. This was the top steering group for the United Nations’ most comprehensive report on the global environment since 2012. Simon also Chairs the Knightsbridge Neighbourhood Forum which produced the first ‘made’ neighbourhood plan in central London in December 2018. Simon has a strong following on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) (@CleanAirLondon) and has been interviewed and quoted by hundreds of media channels nationally and internationally over more than 15 years.
With a decade of experience in participatory research, Dr Varaden has led numerous citizen science projects, including the successful Breathe London wearables study, which actively engaged children in research, enabling the collection of a large and unique data set. It simultaneously increased children’s awareness of air pollution, fostering positive changes in their behaviours to reduce exposure.
Dr Varaden is currently deeply involved in the development and delivery of the engagement, involvement, and participatory strategy for the WellHome study, a community-based research project dedicated to investigating indoor air pollution. Her work underscores the importance of involving non-experts in research and promoting public engagement in health and environmental issues.
3.
JOHN
2.
GALSWORTHY | Director for Climate and Transport
John will present a case-study on how LB of Hammersmith and Fulham have implemented one of Europe’s largest air quality monitoring networks to collect street-level data on air pollution trends, achieving significant environmental outcomes through their pollution reduction scheme.
John has over 20 years of experience working in local authorities and is currently the Director of Climate and Transport in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. Originally starting in civil engineering, he has migrated towards senior management of large services with a multidisciplined workforce.
With a strong focus on technology solutions for local government in the public realm field (Parking/Traffic, Highways, Environmental services, Greenspace and Leisure), John has transformed LBHF into one of the leading boroughs for pollution reduction. Directing a range of projects, from developing clean air neighbourhoods to installing one of the largest air quality monitoring systems in Europe in a high-density area, John has proven successful in tackling transport and climate-related challenges.
Joining John will be a representative from Vortex IOT, who have partnered with Hammersmith & Fulham on their air quality monitoring network.
Sarah is the Chair of the Task Group on Air Quality and Climate Change Guidance for EPIC, the Environmental Policy Implementation Community at the Institution of Environmental Sciences. Sarah is an air pollution specialist with over 28 years’ experience, ranging from policy development, evaluation, and implementation to technical air quality work, and linking with sustainable transport, the built environment and climate change work. She is an Associate Director at ARUP, has run her own consultancy working with public and private sectors, and was previously Head of Air Quality at the Greater London Authority. Sarah has a particular interest in the intersection of air quality and other issues, particularly climate change and health.
4.
SARAH LEGGE | Chair of EPIC’s Task Group
DIANA VARADEN | Imperial College London
CHRISTOPHER HAMMOND | Chief Executive for UK100
Christopher Hammond is the Chief Executive for UK100. UK100 is a cross-party membership organisation that supports the most ambitious councils to go further and faster on their Net Zero and Clean Air targets.
Since joining in 2021, the network has doubled and launched two new ambitious programmes. The Climate Leadership Academy and Local Power in Action. In 2023, the Membership Team which he created, was shortlisted for ‘Team of the Year’ in the Edie Sustainable Leadership Awards. Previously, Christopher served as the elected Leader of Southampton City Council from 20182021. During his tenure as a councillor (2013-2022), he brokered an agreement that led to the country’s first commercial Shore Power facility and devised a Green City Charter subsequently signed by 75 major city organisations. In 2020, he was shortlisted for ‘Leader of the Year’ at the LGIU Councillor Awards.
Fiona manages Cross River Partnership’s (CRP) Smarter Greener Logistics. CRP is a public-private, not-for-profit partnership, that has been delivering positive change for London’s residents, businesses and visitors for 30 years.
CRP is currently delivering a range of projects in London, all of which aim to improve air quality and make London a nicer place to live. CRP’s SGL programme is a Defra-funded project that aims to minimise the impact of freight on noise, air quality, traffic and pavement space in London by making improvements across 14 London boroughs and two London Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). The programme also involves increasing the viability of river freight.
Prior to working at CRP, Fiona worked as a consultant on several sustainable transport and Air Quality projects, including the Mayor’s School Air Quality Audit Programme, an initiative aimed at reducing emissions and exposure at 50 primary schools in some of London’s most polluted areas.
Opening remarks from Paul Day, Editor of AQN, and our host, Beverley Nielsen
Simon Birkett – Clean Air in London
Diana Varaden – Imperial College London
REFRESHMENT BREAK
John Galsworthy LB Hammersmith & Fulham Council and Vortex
Sarah Legge – EPIC’s Task Group on Air Quality REFRESHMENT BREAK
Christopher Hammond – Chief Executive for UK100
Fiona Coull – Cross River Partnership
FIONA COULL | Cross River Partnership
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with Gary Fuller
Gary is one of the UK’s three Clean Air Champions and a member of Defra’s Air Quality Expert Group. He led the development of the London Air Quality Network to become the largest in Europe and has written his own book: ‘The Invisible Killer –the rising global threat of air pollution and how we can fight back’.
Gary also writes the Pollution Watch column for The Guardian and has spoken at a number of our Air Quality Conferences
What did you study at university, that led to what you do now?
Physics. I'm not sure I remember that much of it but when it comes to measuring air pollution it does come in handy because most of the instruments we use, use spectroscopy or other physical processes. But my pathway through to a role in an academic institution, isn't really the pathway that most academics follow.
Also, most of the work that I've done over time has been what you would probably call applied research for different parts of government: Defra, the Environment Agency, the GLA and others, rather than working on the sort of big research grants that most academics do.
What was the first significant work you undertook in the air quality field?
A lot our group at ERG, people like Sean Beevers and David Carslaw, all started together and some of our first significant work involved nitrogen dioxide and diesel engines.
Around 2001, we realised that there was something not quite right about the levels of nitrogen dioxide from traffic. Through the measurements that I made and through the modelling and other work David and Sean did, we were able to observe that there was more NO2 than there should be.
It turned out that the diesels on our roads were using all sorts of clean-up technologies, some of which were leading to greater production of NO2, but we didn't know that at the time. So our very early papers include all these curves and question marks that just said: ‘nitrogen dioxide, there's too much of it.’
Around that time the UK wanted to hit what we now think of as limit values for NO2 by about 2005. And here we are, what, 20-odd years later? Still trying to achieve it in some parts of our cities.
At the last AQN conference you, said that you've been working less on your own science and more ‘representing and supporting other people's science.’ How did that come about?
I suppose over time I've become increasingly aware that the situation we have with air pollution and its health burden in the UK is not due to a lack of evidence. It's due to that evidence not being acted on by government and other stakeholders. So I started to work more and more in the translation of that evidence towards policy. And, about three or four years ago, I become connected with the Clean Air Champions programme.
The Clean Air Champions support a big research portfolio in the UK. There’s £42.5m worth of research projects funded by a variety of organisations - UKRI, the government, the Met Office, National Physical Laboratory and others They’ve all put money into the pot and there's a large portfolio of projects. The Clean Air Champions was set up to ensure that the rest of the research achieved its impact. So our role as champions is to bring together the scientists, so that they work more closely together and interface with other air pollution research that's not inside the programme.
To an extent, the Clean Air Champions are the glue holding the community together?
Exactly. We've just organised a brilliant conference in Birmingham for the Clean Air programme. We had over 200 people, a lot of
them researchers who are actually working hard on the science questions, but also people from government, people from industry as well that were all bought together. It really shows the mass of activity and the strength of this community.
But the challenge is, how do we keep this going? Because research activities are funded for short periods, we need ways to go forward so that the air pollution research community in the UK doesn't fragment after this current round of funding but actually joins together with other people who are doing applied work.
So we're talking to people like the Institute for Air Quality Management and the IES to think about ways in which we can make a bigger air pollution community in the UK and keep that going in the longer term.
Have we got enough science now? We seem to be almost saturated with it, so is it time to see things actually happening as a result of it?
Completely. The weight of evidence in the air pollution and health area is really overwhelming. We know that air pollution is shortening people's lives. What does that look like? Well, it's about 4,000 early deaths per year in London. It's about 40,000 in the UK and it's about 400,000 - from particle pollutionacross Europe. And globally, certainly from outdoor air pollution, you're looking at about four million. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg.
The evidence stacks up and, importantly, the costs stack up. Not just financially, but in terms of the way it impinges on people's lives. But are we really taking that much more action on air pollution than we were 20 years ago? I don't think so.
But there's good evidence that clearing up air pollution really does work. There was a study, just over a year ago, on a completely outdated industrial unit in Pennsylvania. When it was eventually closed there was a 42% reduction in hospital admissions for heart attacks almost overnight. And those figures continued to improve over time.
And we talk about London's ULEZ often and, if you look at the way it's reported in the media, you’d think it was the only such scheme in the world, but there's hundreds of them and the studies around them point to improvements in people's cardiovascular health, or at least the number of people that are attending the hospital for strokes and for heart attacks. And some of the studies point to improvements in the numbers of people attending for respiratory problems as well. So there is lots of evidence that if we do sort this out, then people will be healthier and lead better lives.
Do you think air pollution is high up on their agenda of the British public at all?
No, I think it's quite low. Partly because its invisible. I often think that if people died from air pollution lying in the streets, covered in green spots then we would take a lot more action, but they don't. People may die early with respiratory problems or heart attacks, so it is quite invisible.
I also think the way in which we tackle it doesn't particularly help. We only frame and focus on one part of the problem at a time. If you went back to the 1950s it was home fires, in the 1970s it was power stations, industry and acid rain, and we've moved forward into traffic pollution, particularly that from diesel. We need to look at it much more holistically.
Conversely, while I'm saying there's low awareness of the problem, I've talked to community groups through our WellHome project and there are so many people that really care about the quality of their local environment, but they don't focus it entirely around air pollution. They might think about the impacts of traffic in terms of road accidents, noise and air pollution. They might think about the quality of their streets, not just the amount of traffic but the lack of green space.
So on one hand, you could say people aren't aware of air pollution in its own right that much, but people are aware of the quality of their environment and the way it impacts on their daily lives. And they see air pollution as part of that.
“We know that air pollution is shortening people's lives. What does that look like?
Well, it's about 4,000 early deaths per year in London and globally, about four million. That's just the tip of the iceberg.”
Gary Fuller
In terms of domestic wood burning, do you think it should be tackled through enforcement?
I struggle a bit with the whole idea that low pollution behaviour should be brought about by enforcement. It needs to be brought about in ways that people are encouraged, informed or even empowered to be able to have a less polluting lifestyle.
For instance, in the traffic area, goodness knows how many talks I've done to community groups over the years where the best solutions are to think about leaving the car at home, taking active travel, walking, cycling, public transport or something like that.
That's fine for me to say as a scientist but for many people, the reality is that they don't have those choices. And we need to think a lot more about who's being polluted, who's being impacted, and about the agency that people have to affect change.
So I don't think we should be looking at this through an enforcement lens. We should be looking at it in ways in which we change everybody's attitudes or change what is considered to be acceptable.
Drunk driving is the paradigm that's often put forward, or indoor smoking bans. Not many people are fined for indoor smoking but yet the levels of compliance are really high, because people understand the need for it. So I think we need to get away from thinking about it in terms of enforcement and we need to think about normalising less polluting behaviour.
Many people advocate including air pollution on more death certificates, would this raise the profile of the problem?
There's so many underlying causes that don't appear on death certificates. My Clean Air Champion colleague Stephen Holgate does a lot of work on allergies and it's likely that many deaths caused through allergy are just written down as being caused by, say asthma. So you've got to ask yourself is that really the best intervention possible, that it becomes recognised on death certificates?
Probably the most powerful thing from Ella's death was the Coroner's Prevention of Future Deaths report. One of the things that was asked for was for clinicians to be much more active in this, so they can recognise the people that are being affected from air pollution and think about the interventions that could then come forward. We don't want to wait until someone dies from air pollution. It needs to be further forward in that process. We don't have it too bad here but how worried are you about the rest of the planet?
It's a global problem that we need to be paying much more attention to. The dubious title of the world's most polluted city seems to move round over time. If you went back to the 1950s you would say it was London due to coal burning. There were times when we focused on city places like Mexico City and Los Angeles because of ozone and photochemistry and then we moved on to Beijing. And now the focus, quite rightly, should be in India because the burden from air pollution there is just enormous. And the priority given to it is really not enough.
It's almost as though countries are thought to be on a development pathway, whereby you introduce more and more pollution sources until, at some point later, you decide to clean them up. But by that time a whole generation has been consigned to ill health.
I was involved in a really nice project with Jim McQuaid at the University of Leeds, where they've created air pollution stripes, a bit like Ed Hawkins’ climate stripes, for all of the major cities of the world. If you explore that website, you can see the different trajectories that the various parts of the world are on and the awful deterioration that's happening.
There's data - from the UK mostly, but also some European cities - that give an insight into the air pollution that people experienced in the late Victorian times and into the early 20th century, and that was terrible. But it was ‘only’ being experienced by several tens of millions of people. Now we have equal concentrations in places like India and the countries around it, which is being experienced by hundreds of millions, if not billions of people.
So in terms of looking at it as a humanity-wide problem I think air pollution and its impacts is probably now worse than it's ever been.
A younger Gary Fuller in a previous role, measuring air pollution at the Marylebone Road supersite
Are thresholds and limit values the best way to approach the problem?
In terms of limit values, I wonder whether it’s time to get away from them. The scientific evidence for limit values, in that there is some sort of a safe threshold, is no longer sustainable. It was very much the thinking of the late 1990s and it's not supported by evidence now. We find in studies that there are health impacts from air pollution for as low as you go.
The WHO is giving us guidelines, the limit values is how they're incorporated into law and within the UK there are many instances where they're counterproductive. For instance, if you want to build something that creates a lot of pollution, it's hard to do it in an air quality management area, but it's much more easy to do in a place that's clean. It also means that local authorities and others just focus on big junctions or major roads rather than on the rest of the population where the total gain might be better.
But I think one of the worst impacts of limit values has been in the setting of the targets that are in the Environment Act. The target for 2040 was set according to the progress that could be made in the most polluted places, which constrains our ambition in lesser polluted places. Should we always be focusing in the most polluted locations? Or the locations where vulnerable people are, where children are, where elderly people are?
I think the focus on limit values means that we sometimes put our efforts into the wrong places. UKHSA have been trying to work on a pilot indicator of air pollution vulnerability. And if you look at this on a map, it doesn't always focus on the air quality management areas, It focus on different places where there's a combination of vulnerable people and let's say moderately high air pollution. So maybe that's a better way of doing it.
Do you have a position on LTNS?
LTNS are a really difficult thing to address because it's so hard to be able to see through the entrenched and noisy views that people have about them.
If we look at some of the evidence base – and most systematic studies come from London - what they find is that people that live in low traffic neighbourhoods tend to take more active travel and people that live around low traffic neighbourhoods also tend to do so.
In terms of the health benefits principally from the greater amounts of active travel, they’re just huge. The rate of return for investment in low traffic neighbourhoods in terms of the bricks and mortars, the bollards and the greening of spaces, is just huge in terms of public health later. But they need to be well designed. There’s an argument that traffic is diverted from rich areas to poorer areas but a lot of the evidence on where the LTNS are says that they're not exclusively in wealthy areas. And there's been a lot of traffic counts all pulled together in one study and what they find is that yes, within the LTN areas, there is less traffic, but the notion that the area around them worsens is not borne out by any evidence at all.
Some places around LTNS have a worsening, some places have improvements, so much of this comes from people's lived experience.
Most of the LTNS were put in during COVID and I was out of action at the time, having been hit by a car while cycling, so I wasn't able to visit them as they were installed, to see this for myself.
Gary Fuller addressing last year’s National Air Quality
The one I did see was the one where my parents - who were then in their mid-80s – lived, and it meant that they could cross their road a bit easier. They also found it easier to cross the boundary road as well, simply because there were fewer junctions and it simplified the traffic flow. So it certainly seemed to work in their area, not only inside but on the edge of the zone as well. If you could do one thing to improve our air quality, what would that be?
I'll go for two: Stop focusing on individual pollutants and look at all of the sources of air pollution and look for ways to deal with them. The other one probably would be to start to move away from limit values, take a Vision Zero approach. Vision Zero started when someone in Sweden said ‘why should we carry on building road junctions where we know there will be a fatality rate of 10 a decade? Let’s go for zero.’
Can we bring the same learning into air pollution? Can we look at every development, every road change? Can we look at redesigning our urban areas to try to get air pollution impacts down to zero, rather than focusing our efforts mainly in the most polluted places?
I do think a lot of the solutions lie in urban design, not just in public transport. It’s no use me saying, ‘you should cycle and walk a lot more’ if you know your area just isn't safe to do so, or you don't have a route by which you can walk to school. Wouldn’t that be difficult to implement?
I don't think so. The whole concept behind the 15-minute city is that all the things you need to do in your daily life, be it go to school, go to the shops, go to the doctors, the library, the pub, all of those things, are within a 15 minute journey by walking, cycling or possibly by public transport. And if you look at most of the areas where we live, they were actually designed like this.
I live in an area (outside London) that was mostly built around 1900. It was built with shops on street corners. We have buses, for instance. There are parks nearby. For many of the things you actually have to do, you don't have to travel that far. So strengthening that is what's required, rather than just ripping up our cities and starting again. Most of them were built this way in the first place.
Conference at Lord's Cricket Ground, London
Art, activism and the fight to tackle air pollution in Pakistan and beyond
By Abid Omar, Founder, Pakistan Air Quality Initiative and Dryden Goodwin, Artist and Creator of the Breathe Artwork Series
Air pollution is one of the most pressing issues of our time, with devastating impacts on both human health and the environment. There are few places in the world that experience these impacts as acutely as Pakistan.
The country has the fifth highest levels of outdoor air pollution in the world, with 98% of the population living in areas where pollution levels exceed national air quality standards. In Pakistan, outdoor air pollution has grown to become the second greatest threat to public health, reducing the average Pakistani’s life expectancy by nearly four years. Yet despite these statistics, awareness and engagement with the issue remain alarmingly low. This is by no means unique to the Pakistani context. Action and engagement on reducing air pollution is low worldwide. Recognising this challenge, artists, activists and scientists are combining forces, taking a new approach to increase awareness and inspire political action.
Art has a unique ability to capture our attention, evoke emotion, and inspire action in ways that facts and figures alone cannot. A prime example of this is the Breathe artwork series by artist Dryden Goodwin, produced by UK art-science organisation Invisible Dust, expressing the urgency of the air pollution crisis through powerful and evocative animated drawings shown in public space.
Breathe:Lahore marks the latest iteration of an artwork which began in 2012 and was revisited 10 years later as Breathe:2022 for the Mayor of London’s Borough of Culture in Lewisham. Following this was the special memorial event Breathe for Ella, unveiled in 2023 on London’s Southbank, again supported by
the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, created to bring further awareness to the capital city’s growing air pollution problem and the proposed ‘Ella’s Law’ which would enshrine the right to breathe clean air in UK law.
Breathe is an evolving public artwork that addresses the global air pollution crisis, growing with each new city and context. Created following dialogue with leading air pollution scientists and campaigners, Breathe features 1,600 pencil drawings of clean air activists ‘fighting for breath’.
By drawing these clean air activists, Dryden Goodwin’s Breathe puts faces and bodies to the statistics and highlights the human impact of air pollution. Now, in its international city debut, Breathe:Lahore aims to raise awareness of the public health crisis caused by declining air quality in what is now the world’s most polluted mega-city. In creating this work, Goodwin highlights the vital role compassion and shared understanding plays in bringing people to stand together and call for change:
“I experience drawing as an act of empathy, thinking yourself into another person’s life, their experience and story as you draw them. As it’s clear we don’t all breathe the same air, the role of empathy will play a vital role if we are going to achieve the change needed locally and globally. Through making hundreds of drawings of these individuals – animation seems to become a metaphor for essential collective action. Shifting from making the drawing in my studio, to scaling them up in
public space, I want them to create a heightened awareness of the act of breathing, to be carriers of this urgent information, that air can both sustain and corrupt our bodies,” Says Goodwin
Until now Breathe has been installed across the UK capital and beyond as sequences of posters, animations and projections next to polluted roads – viewed by over 13 million people to date. Breathe has told London’s air pollution story, generating wide media coverage around health impacts, city infrastructure and the vital role policy can play in driving change – but each city has its own story.
This October Breathe:Lahore, supported by funds from UCL, is unveiled at the third Lahore Biennale ‘Of Mountains and Seas‘, curated by John Tain - a programme which asks artists to link their own contexts with Pakistan’s calamitous floods, environmental issues and social inequality. The Breathe:Lahore installation, now grown by Goodwin to include drawings of Pakistani clean air campaigner Abid Omar, appears across hundreds of digital billboards and as printed posters and projections on buildings and underpasses across the city. Omar is founder of the Pakistan Air Quality Initiative, a pioneering organisation seeking to raise public awareness and urge government action by providing communities open access to air quality data across Pakistan. Omar says of his own air pollution journey:
“I was curious to know more about the air around me. This curiosity led to the formation of the Pakistan Air Quality Initiative (PAQI), a community effort to monitor air pollution, and spread awareness through advocacy and data. What started as a handful of monitoring stations in a few cities, has become a nationwide movement where air quality is part of the daily discourse.”
Breathe artist Dryden Goodwin and Campaigner
Abid Omar, founder of Pakistan Air Quality Initiative, in front of the artwork at Alhamra Arts Council Lahor
Goodwin’s drawings of Omar join those he made of six London-based activists, including high-profile clean air champion and WHO clean air advocate Rosamund AdooKissi-Debrah CBE, who began her activism after the death of her 9-year-old daughter Ella in 2013 – the first person in the world to have air pollution cited as a cause of death. The artwork’s arrival in Lahore comes at a critical time for air pollution in Pakistan and the wider region. “Our data has shown that cities in Pakistan are amongst the most polluted in the world, sharing that unfortunate distinction with many other cities in South Asia” says Omar.
But this project is not just about highlighting the problem –it is also about celebrating the potential of collective action and inspiring change. As the project tours to each new city, the aim is to connect a diverse and growing network of clean air innovators, establishing a worldwide collective of individuals who each seek to bring about local transformation. Omar says “We must strive for clearer skies across Pakistan and the Global South. Air pollution is a critical issue that affects us all, with severe health consequences that drastically shorten lives. It’s not just about the skies turning blue – it’s about the health of our communities.”
This is where art can play a key role in tackling the air pollution crisis. By partnering with activists, scientists, and policymakers, artists have a unique ability to help raise awareness, mobilise communities, and drive action. But perhaps even more importantly, art has the power to foster collaboration and share learnings on best practice between countries in the Global North and South.
Breathe by
“Our discourse must be driven by science, and what better way to engage with science than through art? Art can draw in viewers to think and engage on pressing societal issues in ways that the usual scientific practitioners could not imagine.” says Omar. By bringing this project to Pakistan, Breathe intends to set up a global chain of clean air action across the two cities of London and Lahore, connecting two disparate cities with a shared challenge. This kind of international collaboration is crucial for tackling problems that know no borders. By sharing learnings, mobilising communities, and inspiring action, we can work towards a future with cleaner air for all.
Breathe:Lahore is supported by air quality campaigners across Pakistan and is accompanied by a knowledge exchange symposium in Lahore on the 8th October. Convening leading figures on air quality and environmental action working within arts, health, policy, law and campaigning sectors from across Pakistan and the UK, experts from both countries are sharing learnings on the international challenge of tackling air pollution.
Goodwin says: “As Breathe tours to each new city, it connects up a diverse and growing network of clean air activists, a worldwide ‘collective’ of individuals who each endeavour, with urgency and resistance, to bring about local transformation. Their actions contribute incrementally to confronting the global air pollution emergency and the need for radical and lasting change.”
The air pollution crisis is one of the most pressing issues of our time, with devastating impacts on both human health and the environment. Through the power of art, activism and collective action from communities around the world, a cleaner, healthier future for all is possible.
Goodwin is produced by Invisible Dust and has been made possible to date by the support of Mayor of London, Arts Council England, London Borough of Lewisham, Clean Air Fund, University College London, Imperial College, Kings College London, Lahore Biennale Foundation, Schwarzenegger Climate Initiative, Guys and St Thomas Hospital Foundation Trust, Wellcome Trust and Wellcome Collection.
Dryden
New EPIC guidance on air quality and climate change
By Alaric Lester, Technical editor, Krastis Consulting
October 2024 saw the launch of ‘Integrating Air Quality and Climate Change: A Guide for Local Authorities’. The guidance comes from EPIC, the Institution of Environmental Sciences’ Environmental Policy Implementation Community. Alaric Lester, who edited the guidance, tells us more.
We have long known that climate change and air quality pose a huge threat to human health and to the environment. This new guidance from EPIC aims to support local authorities in understanding why integrated climate and air quality action works. They can then act effectively and in a co-ordinated way to develop policy and actions to tackle these twin threats.
History
For 125 years, Environmental Protection UK championed practical environmental policy, particularly for air quality, land condition and noise. Back in 2013, they created guidance on air quality and climate change.
Environmental Protection UK recently merged with the wider family of the Institution of Environmental Sciences to form EPIC. An EPIC task group completed the work of updating the Environmental Protection UK guidance. Our new EPIC guidance is a complete revamp and update of the 2013 document, chock-full of new material.
Why do we need this guidance?
Local authorities are central to the UK’s efforts managing air quality and climate change. On air quality, many hundreds of local authority air quality management areas still risk breaching standards. On climate, more than 30 per cent of emissions reductions needed to deliver the sixth carbon budget will involve local authorities – this according to Government’s 2021 Net Zero Strategy.
We know that air quality and climate change emissions overlap. We know that there can be substantial benefits in tackling both together. We also know that there can be trade-offs and unintended consequences. This guidance is to help local authorities navigate these issues. It aims to help in choosing actions and policy measures that will work for their localities. It aims to help deliver integrated air quality and climate change policy.
On the need for the guidance, Donald Payne, Land & Air Quality Technical Officer at Fife Council, said at the inaugural
EPIC conference on 10 October, “It’s always in the back of our minds that our actions could and should be targeted at mitigating both air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and I feel this new guidance will help to focus our attention on the most suitable interventions.”
Who is it for?
The guidance is for air quality officers, climate change officers, town planners, transport planners, contracts managers, public health officers – any staff whose work can impact emissions or be impacted by emissions. It is also for elected members who want to know more about the issues and policy options.
Although we have aimed the document unashamedly at local authorities, we hope that it will be useful for a wider audience: communities discussing options with their local authorities, central government, students, consultants and others.
“ The guidance is for air quality officers, climate change officers, town planners, transport planners, contracts managers, public health officers – any staff whose work can impact emissions or be impacted by emissions. It is also for elected members who want to know more about the issues and policy options.”
Alaric Lester Technical editor, Krastis Consulting
We want the guidance to be helpful. We want it to be a tool that people will use, then reach for again and again. There is little point in creating practical guidance that is hard to use. We put a lot of effort into editing it, into making it clear and readable. After all, we had tens of contributors and commentators sharing their expertise – expertise and feedback for which we are most grateful.
Using the guidance
The document is intended as a practical working tool: to help explain issues to colleagues; to help see at a glance what options might be relevant; to act as a starting point for researching and drawing up detailed measures. Sarah Legge chaired the EPIC air quality and climate change task group which produced the guidance. She said, “This is bottom-up, hands-on guidance to help local authorities develop and implement more effective action. We want local authority officers to use it, share it with their colleagues and let us know how they find working with it. Some may just use the executive summary and summary tables to understand what is available. Others will delve into the detail.”
We expect people to use it to help fill gaps in their knowledge. Few of us are experts in both air quality and climate change. But we all need to understand co-benefits, potential conflicts and wider impacts before we commit to policies. So we have included enough background information on climate change and air quality for people who may not work directly in these areas. We also touch on wider impacts.
At the heart of the guidance lies the chapter on measures. We list twenty-three sets of measures that local authorities could take. For each measure set, we have a short introduction, along with indicative ratings of possible air quality and climate impacts.
Aerial view of the Olympic Stadium and ArcelorMittal Orbit in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford, London © Andy Evans Photos | Adobe
Families walking to school in Didsbury, Manchester © Mary Turner | Climate Visuals
Users can see at a glance what the measures might involve and whether they are likely to be positive or negative for air quality and climate. We then cover relevant wider impacts from measures, such as on health, noise and the local economy. We list support mechanisms, such as government schemes or work by non-governmental organisations that can support specific actions. We then list what local authorities could do to implement or support actions. Finally we list links to further information.
Case studies feature throughout – real-world experience can be invaluable. They include anti-idling measures in York, Clean Air Gas Engines at construction sites, and low-carbon procurement guidance for the City of London Corporation. We also reference published research where relevant – such as whether and how much low-traffic neighbourhoods have displaced traffic.
Next steps
We want this guidance to reach the right people. Please share it: with your networks, with your colleagues, perhaps even with your local authority.
We would like to know how you find the guidance as a practical tool. How are you using it? How useful is it for you? What more do we need to do to integrate action on air quality and climate change? Please let us know how you get on with it. We plan to hold a feedback meeting in autumn 2025 to take users’ comments on board.
And let’s deliver more local action to tackle air quality and climate change in an integrated way. As Isaac Beevor, from Climate Emergency UK, said at the October EPIC conference, “People understand the co-benefits of climate action more. It feels more real. It’s more tangible than just reducing emissions if you can point to an improvement in air quality. It’s something that happens now.” And as Sarah Legge reiterated, “The guidance will help deliver larger benefits and fewer unintended consequences for the climate, air quality and health”.
About EPIC
EPIC launched in February 2024. It builds on the previous work of Environmental Protection UK, after it merged with the Institution of Environmental Sciences. EPIC aims to understand the challenges around environmental policy and support those delivering on the ground.
Members get a wide range of benefits: a quarterly newsletter; webinars, workshops and conferences; support on implementation skills and good practice; briefings and reports on environmental delivery challenges. They can also help shape EPIC projects.
Joining EPIC is free to members of the Institution of Environmental Sciences. It is also free for local authority environmental professionals. Join online via the IES website.
Scan or click the QR code to find out more about EPIC, or search: the-ies.org/about_us/epic
Scan or click the QR code to find out more about Guidance on air quality and climate change, or search: the-ies.org/resources/ integrating-action-air-quality
Vehicles travelling on the motorway in England © Jevanto Photography |
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Now breathe: microplastic as air pollution
By Martin Guttridge-Hewitt
Microscopic polymer particles are entering our bodies through the respiratory system. Martin Guttridge-Hewitt consults the experts to ascertain when we should start to panic.
Unless you’ve been living under a pile of polymers for two decades, the mountains and islands of discarded plastic the world is struggling to cope with won’t have gone unnoticed. Less obvious is the fact our planet may not just be drowning in the stuff, it could be choking, too.
Microplastics - tiny pieces less than five millimetres in length – are often used in products ranging from toothpaste to textiles, cleaning fluids to cosmetics, paints and even medicines. They can also form as macro-plastics begin to break down into smaller segments. Like a detergent bottle sitting on landfill and slowly degrading. Recent years have seen mounting concern about the impact of these miniscule and often microscopic pollutants on the natural world, including both animal and human health. Particles have been identified in organic tissue on several occasions. In 2020, for example, researchers at the Geological Society of America published a study warning microplastics could be contaminating drinking water. Columbia University backed that up earlier this year, claiming there could be 250,000 tiny plastic particles in every litre of bottled water.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, humans and animals are also breathing in microplastics, with the charity going so far as to claim the average person inhales a credit card’s worth of plastic each week. Yet the American Chemistry Council has a different message, arguing a number of studies have shown microplastics to be much less of a problem than some would have us believe.
‘There have hardly been any studies, but they have found very small amounts of microplastics in lungs, which had been inhaled. But it's literally a handful of studies,’ says Felicity Hayes, a Plant Ecophysiologist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and Chair of the ICP Vegetation, a research programme looking at air pollution impact on crops and other vegetation. Reporting to the Working Group on Effects of the UNECE Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, her work contributes to the development of domestic and global recommendations and regulations.
‘I think it's likely to be a tiny amount that we breathe in, but a lot of anything that we do breathe in would come out again. Just like any form of dust, because we are designed, really, to get rid
of bits that we bring in but don’t want inside us. So just because small amounts have been found in some lungs, it doesn't mean that they were doing any damage at all,’ she continues. ‘In some ways it’s like Victorians putting everything under a microscope –people are looking for microplastics absolutely everywhere, and keep finding them, but what they’re doing, how harmful they are, is knowledge we are really lacking at the moment.’
Still very much in its infancy, research into airborne microplastics only began in the last decade, and the limited evidence means it’s incredibly difficult to ascertain much. That is, beyond the fact that particles are being found in human tissue, including the lungs.
According to Hayes, what we still don’t know is how much can enter the body through respiration at any given time, how much can be removed through processes like sneezing and coughing, and how quickly microplastics can build up in the body. And even then, the jury is still out whether these fragments are a danger to public health.
But there’s another factor most believe does pose a risk. As Hayes explains, the presence of microplastics in lungs, or any other part of the body, may not prove to be a problem. However, any toxic chemicals that were on those microplastics when they were absorbed could be harming us, particularly in larger quantities or over extended periods of time.
‘It would make sense to reduce a lot of microplastics that are in products but don’t really need to be. Like, why toothpaste?,’ Hayes asks rhetorically. ‘But I can’t help feeling that the bigger issue is still the macro plastic litter. As this degrades it turns into smaller pieces anyway. There’s much more macro plastic around, on land and in the oceans. It’s everywhere and we now have this legacy for years to come, which I think will outweigh any of the smaller steps we can take with microplastics.’
Dr Laura Sadofsky is a Senior Lecturer in Respiratory Medicine at the University of Hull. Specialising in coughs, colds, and airway inflammation, over the last five years she has also been involved in work on airborne microplastics, and their presence in humans. This includes a 2022 study that identified plastic particles in lungs.
‘Our first research looked inside people’s houses. Basically, we put glass beakers at head height in 20 homes for one week at a time, then tested what had accumulated,’ she says, explaining that at the time there was very little analysis of microplastics in the air.
Despite the passive approach to sampling, essentially collecting fallout from the air, polymers such as polyethylene terephthalate, polypropylene, polyethylene and fibers were identified.
‘Obviously, we can’t be sure where that’s coming from, but the presence of fibers suggests it’s from textiles and home furnishings, clothing, things like that,’ Sadofsky continues.
‘We also did a study looking at microplastics in the outside environment, with various sampling stations around the city of Hull. There were all sorts of different microplastics outdoors.’
As Sadofsky explains, outdoor analysis revealed big differences in which microplastics were found and where. Industrial areas were inconsistent with residential, and neither compared to roadsides, where resins proved to be the most commonly identified type of microplastic. These variations make understanding any health risks difficult, as our bodies are absorbing varying materials and chemicals from location to location.
‘These are foreign materials potentially getting into the lungs. What effect does that have? I don't know,’ says Sadofsky, before explaining the 2020 University of Hull paper noted effects like inflammation. While it’s certainly possible that over years this could lead to chronic health conditions, more work is needed to gather enough evidence for us to make a judgment either way. And by looking at things on a micro level, we may be missing out on the bigger picture.
Countries including the UK, US and Canada, along with the EU, have been introducing new legislation around plastics, but without the proliferation of a global treaty any efforts on the part of individual nations are unlikely to yield significant results. Simply put, there’s a good chance we will see a rise in the quantities of microplastics entering all parts of the biosphere if larger plastic pollution is allowed to increase, and more of this gradually separates into smaller pieces.
In 2022, 175 countries signed up to develop a legally binding cross-border agreement on plastic pollution. The deadline they set was this year. Sadly, between then and now convincing signs of progress on this have been few and far between. In contrast, evidence of how widespread and complex the plastic crisis is has risen exponentially. So as we look to COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan this month, expectations could not be higher for effective step towards a comprehensive deal to control and regulate plastic, including the use of chemicals in production – seemingly the only way to control pollution on land, sea and in the air.
How community involvement led to the success of Air Aware
By Dave Trew, Land, Water, Air Manager, London Borough of Hackney
October marked the first birthday of Air Aware, an air quality information tool that was designed by, and for, the people of east London.
How it started
When the boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham and City of London collaborated on a funding bid to DEFRA back in 2022, there were no preconceptions about how Air Aware would look. The boroughs recognised that the local communities who were suffering the most from air pollution needed to have information that was easy to access and easy to understand. And the way to achieve that was to ask them what they wanted.
The four boroughs successfully secured more than £300k worth of funding from the DEFRA Air Quality Grant for a wider project which would deliver a training programme for healthcare professionals and establish a network of volunteer Champions in addition to a web-based information tool providing information about air quality and health.
The web tool was the key strand running through each part of the project as it was developed for use by the community,
by the Champions and by the healthcare professionals. To meet the different needs, Air Aware had to be designed to provide a broad range of information and resonate with different audiences.
The procurement process, therefore, needed to find a developer who could understand the subject matter, create engaging content and, most importantly, work with communities to convert their ideas into reality. After evaluating bids from 20 different suppliers, the contract was awarded to Openkit Ltd.
What is Air Aware?
Air Aware is the name for a web-based tool which provides air quality information. It was created with people from the local community in east London and is intended to reach a diverse audience helping them better manage the risks of exposure to air pollution. Based on the ideas and feedback from community members, the site contains 4 main pages:
Promoting Air Aware at a pop-up monitoring event with the Champions
Map
This is the default page when accessing the site. The map serves to get attention as users recognise their local area and piques their curiosity as they want to see where air pollution monitors are located. The page also includes air quality monitoring data from several different networks, so not just those operated by the local authorities. There is also the opportunity to change the settings to display data of interest, for example, for a specific time period or pollutant. Based on community feedback, the option to toggle between Air Quality Objectives and WHO Guidelines was also added. As this is the landing page, it is the most visited page, but the data analytics shows that users are spending time on the page, indicating a high level of interest.
Assistant
This is a key and unique feature of the tool. The community felt that people had lots of questions about air quality but didn’t know where to turn for simple, reliable answers. Using AI, the assistant allows users to ask a question about air quality and quickly receive a summary response based on information drawn from reputable sources. The summary is easy to understand, but includes links to sources for those who want to find out more. Some illustrative questions are included to get users started and to provide confidence in using the function.
An online library of useful information on various topics related to air pollution and health. The various articles have a simplified summary with the option to ‘Read More’. The page hosts a number of videos, as well as various infographics that can be helpful to those looking for quick, simple messages to reuse themselves.
Community
A place where details of events and local news can be shared. News stories related to air quality or climate change are pulled through from media sources and displayed for users to read. The project team also keeps a check for relevant community events happening in the local area so that the events can be promoted to Air Aware users.
Volunteer Recruitment
Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham and City of London are diverse boroughs. Newham is the most ethnically diverse local authority in England and many different languages besides English are spoken within the different areas. A challenge for the Councils was, therefore, how to get people who could represent the diverse groups together and collaborate on creating the design and content of an information tool.
Each borough was tasked with recruiting volunteers from their own area to become an Air Quality Champion. The campaign used the same poster design and social media posts across the boroughs and the opportunity was promoted at local events. This campaign particularly focused on target areas where higher pollutant concentrations overlapped with higher areas of deprivation. The recruitment also aimed to attract a diverse and representative group of volunteers.
Around 100 people from the project area signed up. But It didn’t necessarily mean that expressions of interest would translate into active participation. To cater for different people’s availability, a mixture of online and in-person workshops on different days and times were offered. A financial incentive was also provided for those who attended.
Workshops
The key objective was for the volunteers to set out what they wanted and what they didn’t want. However, the team agreed that presenting a blank page would be unlikely to stimulate conversation or generate ideas. To give the attendees a starting-point for conversation, Openkit presented a range of existing sources of web-based information and the volunteers were asked to identify the pros and cons of each.
An initial prototype of a website was developed by Openkit and presented to the attendees with options of features which could be included. This stimulated discussion with the volunteers being able to offer opinions about the features and how they might work. For example, one idea was to include gamification, with users being able to complete challenges to score points or receive kudos. However, the volunteers rejected this idea as they felt it might shift blame on to the users for failing to complete challenges, rather than empowering them.
Info Hub
Dave is the Land, Water, Air Manager at London Borough of Hackney. He is a member of the Project Team who delivered a DEFRA-funded air quality project, which included the creation of Air Aware.
Dave has a Postgraduate Diploma in Air Pollution Management and Control and has been working in local government on air quality projects for the past 16 years, including 4 years with Hackney.
Dave Trew Land, Water, Air Manager, London Borough of Hackney
Web Tool Design and Development
The success of the project depended on the tool being developed by, and for, the local community. This meant incorporating functions to improve accessibility such as the ability to translate into the languages spoken within the area. Attendees also needed to see that their opinions had been considered and ideas taken on board. If they didn’t, their continued involvement in the project would have been put at risk.
To maintain the momentum and interest of volunteers, the project team continued to involve them in decisions about the web tool. A poll was carried out to select a name for the site and Air Aware emerged as the clear winner. Once we had the name, Openkit worked on the logo designs to come up with a selection of options. Again, this was put to the vote.
Openkit’s involvement undoubtedly contributed to the success of the final product. They took the feedback from the workshops and developed a prototype based on what people said that they wanted. And then worked on it and adjusted it and then amended it some more. This was reflected in the comments from the volunteers when the final version was released. Volunteers’ comments were not just about the web tool; about how engaging the site looked or how easy it was to find information. Volunteers complimented the process of development. One said they had felt included in the decisions and were impressed with how Openkit had presented a final product which reflected the feedback that had been provided.
Launch
Air Aware launched in October 2023. The initial launch was deliberately low-key so that testing of the site could be carried out using our partner, Global Action Plan. This required a group of users who had no knowledge of the site to answer questions. These were then compared to responses to the same set of questions from a group of users who were asked to interact with the site beforehand. The results were positive showing that there was a much greater understanding among those who had used Air Aware.
Following testing, Air Aware was promoted widely at events and with an on-street ad campaign. The assets included QR codes which allowed the project team to monitor which locations and times were driving traffic to the site. Peaks were noticed where there was an active engagement event where there was faceto-face interaction.
What next for Air Aware?
Without knowing what the site would look like or how it would be used, the project team set a target of 1,000 users within the first 6 months. After 12 months, there have been nearly 5,000 different users of the site. While aimed at the community within east London, users are visiting the site from much further afield, since features like the information hub is a great resource for all.
Given its success in its first 12 months and the interest it has generated from beyond the project area, there is the potential for Air Aware to expand. The site needs to be managed and maintained to ensure it still has current appeal to users. But remembering its origins in the local community of east London will be crucial to any future development.
Defra air quality project A4 poster
We are delighted to announce the launch of the 2025 Northern Air Quality Conference. For exhibition, sponsorship and marketing opportunities, to get your company, brand and services in front of an engaging local government audience, please contact; Andy Lees | 07843 632609 | a.lees@spacehouse.co.uk
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