Concluding Post on Air Pollution

Having posted largely on air pollution over the past three months, I gained much insight on the true severity of air pollution around the world and evaluated the effectiveness of various air pollution control solutions. Air pollution occurs in varying scale ranging from city to regional air pollution. Air pollution in cities largely originate from the vehicular exhaust sources while regional air pollution includes transboundary haze pollution, commonly experienced in Southeast Asia, from the illegal "slash and burn" techniques to clear land for cash crop plantations.

My greatest takeaway would be that air pollution poses a huge risk to many countries in the world but there is also an inequitable global distributions of the impacts of the air pollution. 

This is further exacerbated by the disparity in the level of development as the poorer and developing countries are usually more vulnerable to air pollution. This is because of the lack of effective legislation system and political will in tackling air pollution sources. In most cases, the environment is sacrificed to attain higher economic growth by having weak regulations to attract polluting industrial activities. Perhaps they can only afford to put emphasis on the sustainability of their environment into their development plans when they are able to meet basic standard of living such as having proper education system, sanitation and other public utilities infrastructure. 

We have also seen the importance of having tough enforcements to ensure effective air pollution control in the case of China. The lack of enforcement by its regional governments have tainted the Central government's resolve in eliminating air pollution. Regional collaboration between countries is also critical to tackle regional air pollution such as the Southeast Transboundary Haze  in Indonesia through the ratification of effective treaty.

Nevertheless, at the individual level, we can protect ourselves against air pollution through gaining more awareness of air pollution and the risks we are exposed to. In addition, we can help make a difference by opting for greener mode of transport such as taking public transportation, and minimising the amount of our waste through reducing, reusing and recycling so that lesser waste will be sent to our incineration plants (cut down the liberation of dioxins and air pollutants associated with incineration of waste). We also learn that we can choose products with eco-labels in the case of encouraging sustainable growth of palm oil to discourage those irresponsible palm oil manufacturers from exploiting the "slash and burn" techniques that has resulted in catastrophic haze episodes. 

I have also introduced some promising technologies that may greatly help in the combat against air pollution, such as electric cars and the feasibility of safer nuclear power technology. 

Signing off (in preparations for my final exams)

It has been an enjoyable experience in maintaining an environmental blog to discuss on air pollution. Stay tuned in the future as I would post on other  interesting environmental issues or knowledge after my final examinations. I also really appreciate the support from the amount of viewers from all over the world, especially the viewers from the United States and even from Ukraine. Lastly, I hope that my blog has been informative yet interesting and my viewers have learnt as much as I do over the past few months. 

Potential of Nanoparticles as Emerging Air Pollutants? 

Are Nanoparticles a Real Cause of Concern to our Health?
Source: BSIP/UIG/Gettyimages

In one of my earlier blogposts, I shared about the detrimental health consequences associated with particulate matter (PM2.5) such as their scientifically proven abilities to cause serious lung and heart diseases with prolonged exposure. Today I will be discussing on some of the lesser known nanoparticles engineered from nanotechnology and the existing knowledge gap in ascertaining whether will they pose a risk of concern to our health.

Nanoparticles have long been engineered for a wide range of applications. In fact, we are already exposed to them on a regular basis as they are highly used in the manufacturing of daily products. For instance, nanoparticles such as titanium dioxide can be found in many products ranging from paints to cosmetics while silver nanoparticles can even be found in deodorants. 

Unlike the larger PM2.5 air pollutant which is already proven to pose great health risk in terms of lung and heart diseases, scientists are still unable to conclude on the health effects of these nanoparticles. However, there is an increasing concern of the potential of these nanoparticles in causing grievous harm to our bodies. For instance, there is a recent report has shown that silver nanoparticles have the ability to create free radicals that are highly associated to many forms of cancer. However, the experiments are only conducted using human cells in laboratory settings and thus the scientists are unable to directly apply the results with great confidence. 

Similarly another group of scientists has also experimented different type of nano materials such as carbon nanotubes and ultrafine carbon particles on human respiratory cells and mice. The results were alarming as both the human cells and mice showed that nanoparticles can result in the autoimmune diseases in which the immune system will start to attack and destroy healthy tissues and even organs.

Although the current human epidemiology studies still have a high uncertainty on the exact health risk that nanoparticles can pose to us, it will be reckless to conclude that all engineered nanoparticles are safe. Instead, these reports show the need to intensify our research into these nanoparticles as there may be a chance that some of these nanoparticles would actually pose serious health concerns. Thus, the fight against air pollution has to keep up with the ever-improving technology.