Fume raiders
OUR TEAM HIT STREETS WITH POLLUTION TESTERS
Carbon monoxide. Nitrogen dioxide, ground level ozone, particulates, sulphur dioxide, hydrocarbons and lead. If you have driven to work, or taken a bus, you have probably been exposed to these today. Walked the dog? You may well have got a good dose of them while you were at it. In Scotland’s built-up areas, a breath of fresh air may be anything but. Today is the first ever National Clean Air Day, designed to draw our attention to the hidden toxins in our environment. Air pollution contributes to one in 13 cases of lung cancer, furs the arteries, increases the risk of bladder cancer and is bad for those with existing heart and lung conditions. We sent three people out to monitor the air they breathe as they travel around. They used CleanSpace tags, devices that link to smartphones, to track the level of pollution in each journey. The results were surprising.
AS SOMEONE who has to tackle the M8 three days a week, I fully expected my pollution sensor would go into overdrive during commuting in heavy traffic.
But the results my tag actually fed back really surprised me.
I live on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where I can almost smell the sea air from the Forth with its shores less than a couple of miles away.
Though the street where I live with my family is a quiet one, I soon came to realise the pollution levels we can be subjected to mean we might as well be living in the city centre. That’s because we live close to one of Scotland’s most polluted streets – Queensferry Road.
In the absence of the various junctions that take commuters in and out of Glasgow city centre, there is really only one major route into the northwest of Edinburgh, and we’re sitting next to it.
With traffic streaming in from the Forth Road Bridge and surrounding areas, Queensferry Road is frequently highly polluted.
It meant that after a week of using my CleanSpace tag, I learned that the times in which I was most exposed to pollution
were not in fact when I was sitting in my car on the M8 – it was when I was out walking locally with my kids.
The very time I thought I was going for a breath of fresh air was, in reality, when we were breathing in lungfuls of something very different.
One of the worst times in the week was in fact on Sunday afternoon while we were walking our dog and the traffic on nearby Queensferry Road was heavy.
Walking in and out of Glasgow city centre at lunch on work days didn’t seem to cause a problem, even when I could smell petrol fumes in the air. On my morning commutes, there were usually points showing moderate pollution but typically, that was when I was heading out of town and back in again using Queensferry Road.
The Monday morning traffic heading into Glasgow on the M8 caused moderately polluted air.
So it’s been an enlightening exercise – and as the point of the tag is to help you make better travel choices to breathe in cleaner air, I will be walking my dog in the opposite direction in future.