World Environment Day Celebration

World Environment Day
Celebration
Description World Environment Day is celebrated on the 5th of June every year, and is the United Nation's principal vehicle for encouraging awareness and action for the protection of our environment.
Observances: Environment Protection
Date: Wednesday, 5 June, 2019
Significance: Environmental issues awareness
Also called: Eco Day, Environment Day, WED (World Environment Day)
#BeatAirPollution #SNCF
Here are some examples:

Use public transport or car sharing, cycle or walk
Switch to a hybrid or electric vehicle and request electric taxis
Turn off the car engine when stationary
Reduce your consumption of meat and dairy to help cut methane emissions
Compost organic food items and recycle non-organic trash
Switch to high-efficiency home heating systems and equipment
Save energy: turn off lights and eltronics when not in use 

Choose non-toxic paints and furnishing.

Beat air pollution with this!

15
Nov

1. Avoid exercising outdoors when pollution levels are high. When the air is bad, walk indoors in a shopping mall or gym or use an exercise machine. Limit the amount of time your child spends playing outdoors if the air quality is unhealthy.
2. Always avoid exercising near high-traffic areas. Even when air quality forecasts are green, the vehicles on busy highways can create high pollution levels up to one-third mile away.
3. Use less energy in your home. Generating electricity and other sources of energy creates air pollution. By reducing energy use, you can help improve air quality, curb greenhouse gas emissions, encourage energy independence and save money!
4. Encourage your child’s school to reduce exposure to school bus emissions.
5. Walk, bike or carpool. Combine trips. Use buses, subways, light rail systems, commuter trains or other alternatives to driving your car.
6. Don’t burn wood or trash. Burning firewood and trash are among the major sources of particle pollution (soot) in many parts of the country.
7. Use hand-powered or electric lawn care equipment rather than gasoline-powered. Old two-stroke engines like lawnmowers and leaf or snow blowers often have no pollution control devices. They can pollute the air even more than cars, though engines sold since 2011 are cleaner.
8. Don’t allow anyone to smoke indoors and support measures to make all public places tobacco-free.

10 ways to beat air pollution: how effective are they?

The air we breathe

Cities

From particle-zapping bus stops to compact ‘smart’ air filters, we examine the methods that tackle the symptoms of air pollution

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Amy Fleming

Wed 15 Feb 2017 12.11 GMTLast modified on Fri 11 May 2018 13.08 BST

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 Effective, or effectively pointless? ... anti-pollution face masks. Photograph: Rolex Dela Pena/EPA

Tackling the causes of air pollution has been on of the themes of our special focus this week, The Air We Breathe.

But in the short term, what about the symptoms? We examined some of the most common solutions to see if the claims they make are anything more than hot air.

Face masks

Despite looking deeply dystopian, surgeons’ masks are an increasingly common sight in cities around the world – and largely pointless, according to Prof Ally Lewis, director of the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science. “Surgical masks are pretty useless because air just leaks in around the side,” Lewis says.

As for more sophisticated anti-pollution masks? “Others are designed to be far more airtight and do remove particles, but don’t remove gases. Nitrogen dioxide can pass right through.” What’s more, if the seal is good enough to keep small particles from leaking in, it may also require uncomfortable amounts of energy to suck air through the mask.

“You can conceive of extremely elaborate devices that are closer to chemical-weapons gas masks,” says Lewis, “which would filter out gases and particles – it just depends what you’re prepared to do.” His hunch is that you’d make more of an impact by changing your commuting pattern to avoid busy roads at peak times.

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The humble extractor fan

Cooking can cause massive spikes in indoor air pollution, so “extractor fans are a very good idea,” says Rob MacKenzie, professor of atmospheric science at University of Birmingham, “as long as they’re venting outside – and especially if you have a gas hob, because flames produce nitrogen dioxide.”

Personal air purifiers

These come in all sizes – from take-out coffee cup to big industrial-looking drums. “If you run a big blower with a fine particle filter on it,” says Lewis, “as long as your house isn’t too leaky, it will make a meaningful difference to the particle numbers. The question regarding these products is: is the volume of air it’s filtering significant relative to the volume of the house?”

A home might cover hundreds of cubic metres, and in most houses the air is completely renewed every hour. “If your unit is the size of a drinks can,” asks Lewis, “does it seem reasonable that it is going to make its way through tonnes of air?”

A frequent complaint about the plug-in machines – which have become common domestic appliances in China – is their size. “It’s like having a rattling old air-conditioner,” says Lewis “it takes a lot of energy.”

Mark Jacobson, director of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, has an even more fundamental problem with the growing adoption of personal purifiers. “They are a short-term way for people to save their lungs but they do not solve air pollution problems – which also harm animals, agriculture and structures. People should not have to breathe through an air filter their entire life.”

In-car filter systems

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Consumers can’t know how effectively their car filters the air they breathe. “Cars are small, sealed boxes,” says Lewis, “but they are driven in the most polluted place there is: the middle of the road. Their filters have a tough job.”

As well as most particulates, filters in modern cars should catch noxious gases such as nitrogen dioxide with charcoal. But performance will vary and filters become less effective with use – so they need replacing around every six months.

Filters should also work more efficiently, says MacKenzie, “if you limit the air exchange between inside and outside, by switching to recirculation rather than continual fresh air. It’s somewhat morally bankrupt, though, to be sitting in your luxury 4X4 with pristine air, churning out god knows what from your exhaust.”

Bus shelter pollution zappers

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 Vehicle pollution in Guatemala City. Photograph: Rodrigo Abd/AP

Air-purifying bus shelters and street furniture are being developed, some using filters and others with added oxidation, which turns gases into dust. It sounds like a good idea, but, says Lewis, “you’ve got to think about how big the atmosphere is over a city. Hundreds and hundreds of square kilometres, possibly 2km deep, so you’ve got a massive swimming pool of pollution.”

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Unless the bus stop is enclosed, like a mini-waiting room, he says, “the mixing of the atmosphere will completely outweigh the benefits you might get from blowing a bit of filtered air around.”

Underground train networks face a similar issue: “It isn’t a sealed box that you can clean up. Every time a train goes through, it’s like a piston replenishing the polluted air. You’d need machines to move thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of tonnes of air per hour.”

Clean buildings

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Lewis sees more gains to be had by cleaning the air in offices and other workplaces than on the streets. “A modern office building is already very air-tight for energy efficiency,” says Lewis, “so you have the opportunity to filter the air because you’re not replenishing it with polluted air from outside.”

More trees

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 A tree-lined street in Gothenburg. Photograph: Souvid Datta for the Guardian

“In terms of air pollution mortality and morbidity, planting trees doesn’t help very much at all,” says Jacobson. “Planting is more useful for absorbing carbon dioxide, which affects pollution indirectly through temperatures but not directly as a chemical air pollutant.” (There are, of course, many other environmental, economic and health benefits to trees – although recent guidance from National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice)warned that their leaves and branches slow air currents, causing pollutants to settle, and they may also act as sinks for particulates and chemicals.)

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Then again, perhaps we just haven’t been doing it right? While bunging more trees along London’s Oxford Street probably won’t touch the sides, the more leaves there are, the more fine particulates (PM10s and PM2.5s), nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide will be removed from the air. “You’d need two man-made filters to achieve the same effect, which would increase the energy burden,” says MacKenzie, who has a particular interest in how plants affect air.

“The most useful places to put lots of vegetation are pedestrianised areas,” he explains, “because there’s nothing there to make the air dirtier. Trees offer the advantage of closing off the area from polluted air above. And tall trees are helpful near motorways because they produce turbulence that helps traffic pollution disperse.”

Green walls

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 Green and clean: Le Musée du quai Branly in Paris. Photograph: Alamy

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For heavily trafficked streets, says MacKenzie, “green walls would appear, in theory, to be a better option than trees” – since the plants up the side of a building can do their job without risk of trapping pollution at street level. Their success, however, will depend on many factors.

“Green walls could help with pollution hotspots, but not with every hotspot – you have to do careful calculations,” MacKenzie explains. “It would require a lot of green vegetation, a lot of maintenance and careful, heavy implementing. So it might be an expensive solution.”

Domestic air quality monitors

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Lewis co-authored an article in the scientific journal Nature last year, warning about the proliferation of unregulated, affordable air quality sensors. “Smart” sensors now even come with apps offering breakdowns of CO2, particulates and volatile organic compounds.

“There is a significant challenge in making a decent measurement of air pollution with a cheap device,” Lewis says. “The sensors may be unreliable and they are marketed at the general public, who have no way of knowing whether they’re working or not.”

By contrast, he points out, air pollution monitoring equipment used by government organisations such as Defra, or academic researchers “typically costs tens of thousands of pounds. If we had a cheap way of doing it, we’d do it the cheap way.”

Lewis advises against making health decisions based upon personal monitor readings. The most accurate guide to air quality in your home is to keep track of your local outdoor readings and to keep a close eye on possible internal sources of pollution. “If you’re constantly frying in a wok or have an open fire, you will be making additional sources [of air pollution]. It’s not rocket science, and you probably don’t need a sensor to tell you that.”

Responsible burning

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 Smokeless coal can produce harmful particles. Photograph: Jake Hellbach/Alamy

MacKenzie says he finds it bizarre that, for fans of domestic open fires, “the smell is part of the attraction, when that’s telling you it’s a source of pollution”.

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If your carbon monoxide alarm goes off when you have a fire, you should assume there are other, significant pollutants in the room’s air. “However, the threshold on an alarm is set quite high,” MacKenzie warns, “because it’s about whether you’re going to fall asleep and never wake up again. If it doesn’t go off, you might still have concentrations of carbon monoxide and other particles in your house.”

Good ventilation, dry fuel and high temperatures are essential for clean burning, while swept and lined chimneys provide further protection. Even with so-called smokeless fuel, you need to take care. “I’d estimate that smokeless coal produces more nitrogen oxides than wood fuel,” MacKenzie says, “and they both produce the very small particles that are the least noticeable, but the most harmful, of the smoke

The best - and worst - countries for air pollution and electricity use

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China steals an unsavory global spotlight for the thick, noxious smog that often chokes its mega-cities.

Air pollution has become so bad in Beijing, for example, that Chinese officials aim to slash its local coal consumption by 30% in 2017.

Meanwhile, the US — which currently ranks eighth on the list of countries with the lowest air pollution — could be headed in the opposite direction.

President Donald Trump has said that he intends to fulfill his campaign promise of revitalizing the American coal industry, despite the criticism of fossil fuel industry analysts and the rise of affordable sources of renewable energy. Congress is also working to repeal numerous environmental and health regulations.

With these and other changes afoot, it's worth taking a look at current global rankings to see how China, the US, and other countries stack up when it comes to air quality, total energy use, and renewable contributions to power production.

Here the best and worst of 135 countries according to World Health Organization(WHO) and International Energy Agency data, which was shared with Business Insider by The Eco Experts, a UK-based solar energy comparison site.

Image: International Energy Agency/World Health Organisation (via The Eco Experts)

There are many ways to measure air pollution, but a key indicator is called "PM 2.5" — one of the most harmful classes of airborne pollutants.

The "PM" stands for "particulate matter," and the "2.5" stands for 2.5 microns in diameter or smaller — roughly the size of a single bacterium. Such pollution, as Business Insider's Lydia Ramsey explained in 2016, "is especially dangerous because it can get lodged in the lungs and cause long-term health problems like asthma and chronic lung disease."

When PM 2.5 levels go above roughly 35 micrograms per cubic meter of air, it can become a major health problem. The WHO recommends keeping PM 2.5 levels to about 10 micrograms per cubic meter.

While Chinese cities have recently hit more than 500 micrograms of PM 2.5 per cubic meter, Saudi Arabia, on a per-country average, has the most toxic air in the world.

Image: International Energy Agency/World Health Organisation (via The Eco Experts)

Image: International Energy Agency/World Health Organisation (via The Eco Experts)

Air pollution levels are one thing, but deaths attributed to them are another.

Take China, for instance. The country isn't in the top 10 for highest average levels of air pollution, in terms of PM 2.5 (Saudi Arabia wins that contest, thanks in part to its oil industry). However, it ranks fifth for having the most deaths per capita due to air pollution, in part because if its high population density.

The US currently has one of the lowest death rates attributed to air pollution.

Image: International Energy Agency/World Health Organisation (via The Eco Experts)

Image: International Energy Agency/World Health Organisation (via The Eco Experts)

Decades of scientific investigation across multiple lines of evidence corroborate a powerful yet inconvenient truth: Human-caused global warming and climate change is real, and it's briskly accelerating as we dump more carbon into the atmosphere.

Looking at per-person average emissions of carbon dioxide, a persistent greenhouse gas emitted by burning fossil fuels, the US ranks as the eighth-highest contributor in the world.

Less developed nations, which lack robust and power-hungry infrastructure, rank among the lowest contributors to carbon dioxide emissions.

Image: International Energy Agency/World Health Organisation (via The Eco Experts)

Image: International Energy Agency/World Health Organisation (via The Eco Experts)

The main reason the US ranks so poorly on carbon dioxide emissions is because its per-person consumption rate of electricity is so high; all of that energy comes primarily from fossil fuels.

As with carbon dioxide emission rankings, less developed nations tend to score better on electricity consumption because access to electrical power is not as widely available.

Image: International Energy Agency/World Health Organisation (via The Eco Experts)

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