Breath, death and data: The air
Sipho Kings
You need to get out of a city to look back and see the blanket of yellow, brown and red toxic air that covers it. This makes for dramatic photographs. But the mix of chemicals, dust, car exhaust fumes, burning firewood and hundreds of other pollutants is overwhelming the lungs of people living there.
In Johannesburg, this air is bad enough to be dubbed “airpocalypse” 15% of the time — and it stays above safe levels for half of the year.
This data on what you breathe has long been kept a secret, shared only between polluters and regulators.
That’s changing. The South African Air Quality Information System has a website (saaqis.environment.gov. za) and an app that provides data for all working government pollution monitoring stations.
It shows results for areas, such as Soweto, by means of a face emoji — green and smiling for healthy air, red and frowning for “very unhealthy” air. Weeknights in Soweto this week showed sad faces.
But this data is only useful if you live near the station. People, desperate to know what they’re breathing, are increasingly turning to a host of apps that combine data from ground-based monitoring stations with the ever-present sensors on satellites.
These show pockets of air pollution drifting across the country, and they give results for your street.
To dig into what’s really happening, the Mail & Guardian has been given data by Plume Labs, a startup that builds portable air sensors that combine with satellite data to tell people about the air they breathe.
The data runs from January 2018 to this May, covering the major metropolitan areas with readings taken every three hours. This makes up nearly 4000 data points per city across the 17 months. Plume has built its own index for the air quality that it measures: zero is clean air and 300 is airpocalypse.
The higher the number, the less time people can spend breathing it in before it starts to make them sick. It needs to be under 100 to be safe.
For a family living in Soweto, for example, everyone at the dinner table is breathing in polluted air.
The children, fresh from school sports activities where the heavy exertion means they breathe dirty particles deep into their lungs, could
develop asthma.
The parents, who commute to work, breathe in fumes from vehicles. The family members then struggle through illness because they cannot afford to go to hospital.
At dangerous levels, the particles this family breathes in lodge in their airways, lungs and blood vessels, breaking them down. Any pollutants attached to the particles then start to poison them.
This can start in the womb, leading to childhood cancers, impaired mental and motor development, behavioural disorders, stunted growth, increased risk of respiratory disease and even death.
The World Health Organisation says air pollution kills more than seven million people a year, making it a bigger killer than malaria or HIV. At least 20 000 of these deaths happen in South Africa.
The numbers
Particulate matter (PM), with some particles as fine as a human hair (PM2.5 and PM10), is the total mix of solid and liquid particles hanging in the air. It’s the dust you can see when a weak ray of light shines through the window in your home.
Because they are so tiny the particles are in the air for longer and are easily inhaled by humans and animals. In Johannesburg, Plume measured the levels of particulate matter as high as 1115, nearly four times what it qualifies as airpocalypse.
The level of these pollutants was above 100 nearly half of the time in the 17 months covered by the Plume data set. This means that on any given day, the air in a 40km-radius of South Africa’s biggest city was dangerous for about 12 hours.
In Pretoria, the highest level of particulate matter was 1007 and was also at dangerous levels half of the time.
Durban hit levels of 1 283, and passed the safe 100 mark a quarter of the time. Levels in Cape Town rose to 972, and were over 100 for a quarter of the time. In Bloemfontein, levels rarely exceeded the 200 mark.
Levels of specific pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, ozone and nitrogen oxides, were at much lower levels but consistent exposure to these also affects health.
In a presentation about air pollution in the Vaal Triangle — an intensely polluted area in southern Gauteng where the apartheid government stacked its most polluting industries and their workforce — the national environment department went with the title: To Breathe or Not to Breathe.
Who is to blame?
This mix of pollutants comes from everyone. Large polluters, such as Sasol and Eskom, attract the greatest pressure from civil society groups — a Constitutional Court challenge was launched earlier this month because of the consistent levels of pollution in Mpumalanga’s highveld. The president was cited as a respondent.
But air pollution is a bigger story than that. It also includes people who can’t afford electricity and need to burn coal and wood in their homes — something the recent Eskom price hike has exacerbated. Half of air pollution deaths come from this indoor pollution.
Service delivery failures result in people burning waste that isn’t collected — and protests over these failures also release toxic pollutants, especially when tyres are burnt. If the biggest polluters were to decrease their pollution, levels of dangerous toxins would still be too high — the cumulative effect of all the smaller polluters, individual people included, is considerable.
The 2004 Air Quality Act allowed government, through the national air quality officer, to set limits for each pollutant. The first such step came into effect in 2015. But Eskom and other polluters applied for exemptions. Those exemptions are signed off at a local government level, where districts such as Nkangala, in Mpumalanga, don’t have the resources to thoroughly examine pollution transgressions.
Those exemptions were meant to give companies until 2020 to comply with the law. But Eskom and its peers are submitting new applications for exemption.
Officials at the environment department say they have to be realistic about this — the department has little political clout and wouldn’t be able to force state-owned entities, or big private companies, to comply with the law unless it happens gradually.
In practice this means the air Act is largely ignored. In its 2014 report into the first round of applications — titled Slow Poison: Air Pollution, Public Health and Failing Governance — Pietermaritzburgbased nongovernmental organisa