Slashdot Mirror
Household Products Now Rival Cars As a Source of Air Pollution, Say Scientists (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Household cleaners, paints and perfumes have become substantial sources of urban air pollution as strict controls on vehicles have reduced road traffic emissions, scientists say. Researchers in the US looked at levels of synthetic "volatile organic compounds", or VOCs, in roadside air in Los Angeles and found that as much came from industrial and household products refined from petroleum as from vehicle exhaust pipes. The compounds are an important contributor to air pollution because when they waft into the atmosphere, they react with other chemicals to produce harmful ozone or fine particulate matter known as PM2.5. Ground level ozone can trigger breathing problems by making the airways constrict, while fine airborne particles drive heart and lung disease. Writing in the journal Science, De Gouw and others report that the amount of VOCs emitted from household and industrial products is two to three times higher than official US estimates suggest. The result is surprising since only about 5% of raw oil is turned into chemicals for consumer products, with 95% ending up as fuel.
It's better for the planet and gets out bloodstains without club soda.
Livestock pollutes far more. We can take direct action against it by not buying products made from animals and their secretions.
"and found that as much came from industrial and household products" Industrial puts out a fucking helluva lot more than household products even possibly ever might...
Who wrote this rubbish? Household = Industrial????? Fucking liar. Bait and switch is NOT the way this site will thrive.
That paint must be super toxic, or people must be spraying it out the back of the car as they are driving, or some factories are just belching out the pollution. Cause cars run 24/7 all year long, hard to compete with that output no matter how good the pollution control is on cars these days.
Since I stopped using anything with scents or dyes in it, I've become really aware of anything with perfumes. I started with dish soap, then laundry detergent, the shower soap.
My laundry detergent still has fluorescent dye in it for colors and whites, but no perfume or other dyes. My dish soap is Seventh Generation, and my shower soap is Dr. Bronner's. (I love those bottles! Reading material in the shower!)
It doesn't save me any money? Stuff without all the added crap is around 30% more expensive. But I've also become far more aware of my own body odors, and act accordingly.
The downside is when I visit friends or co-workers who use "air freshener", it's like having to endure a teargas attack. And going anywhere near the soap aisle in the grocery store is a total non-starter. X.X
[End Of Line]
Reading the fucking labels of shower soap?
WTF are you, a houseplant?
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
I hear where they don't want me to use hairspray. They want me to use the pump!
Because the other one – which I really like better than going "bing, bing, bing," and then it comes out in big globs, right?
And it's stuck in your hair and you say, "Oh my God, I gotta take a shower again! My hair's all screwed up!" Right?'
I wanna use hairspray!
aaaaaaa
I can't even walk though the detergent isle in the grocery store without getting a headache.
Some women seem to think they stink so bad that a gallon of perfume will make them more attractive. It won't. In fact less is more.
I'd love if "fragrance" entered the same territory as peanuts.
Maybe it's just large amounts of bad smelling people. Just kidding. By the way, if you live in a city so dense and overcrowded and impossible to support comfortable human life like 250,000+ people, you're asking for problems like this.
With the garage door closed, take all the products you will use in a lifetime and pour them all out in your garage and go to sleep in there. Will you wake up the next morning? Don't attempt the same thing with a car turned on with you locked in the garage with it. I realize that's not exactly what this article is getting up but come on. Use some common sense.
The worst thing is actually container ships. They spew more pollution that all the cars combined, but they're selectively ignored (globalism). They could improve over night, but they're allowed to burn unrefined fuel (very cheap). The next time anyone moans about "pollution" ask them to direct their attention to the shipping industry. It's a low hanging fruit and improvements are already available.
There is no way, No Way you do more pollution in your house then with your car!
This is one of this articles where you pick the best case scenario for cars. Then you remove data from car type that make the most pollution (like old cars, industrial cars, commercial cars...) And you compare it to the worse case scenario of a house pollution, in that day of the year when that house is polluting the most.
Then you release this crap and go get your paycheck from oil companies...
From the article, not in the summary:
It’s hard to say how much pollution is down to VOCs, but a rough estimate is that between one quarter and a third of all particles are made up of organic compounds that originate as VOCs,
So it's a significant, but not the main source of particulate pollution (in Western cities where the air is usually pretty clean). It doesn't have anything to do with CO2 emissions and global warming/climate change.
... with its zero diversity massive moncultures covered in pesticides and incectides that eventually wash into rivers and poison the ecology there too.
You can make a case for veganism and animal welfare, but don't even attempt to make out its any more enviromentally sound overall. In fact when you consider sheep can graze on hill land that cannot be farmed for crops its probably a lot worse. Oh , and man made microfibres from man made clothing are currently pollution the oceans. But I guess you'd have a problem with wool too.
. . . that car exhausts have gotten so clean, that outgassing from household and industrial products is now noticeable, instead of being noise in the metrics. . .
We can take direct action against it by not buying products made from animals and their secretions.
Yes but we won't because farming in the west is a disaster and animals are a healthy source of nutrients to keep our bodies going. On the other side using hydrocarbon propellants and stuff that covers up the smells of farts doesn't really help me through my day very much at all.
Maybe I can use this article to convince my fiance to get rid of all our plugin air-fresheners! They always seem to cause me to sneeze.
Alternative headline:
Automobile emissions drop to the levels of household products.
The habitually denominate industrial product volumetrically (mass and volume are paramount in matters of shipping and pit mine scars), while back in biology—and much of chemistry—potency is denominated in surface area (kidney, cortex, lungs, intestine, platinum catalyst, capacitors, and on and on).
From time to time, one sees the cost of silicon lithography denominated in acres, but even this is mostly for chuckles.
Internal combustion also depends crucially on surface area, but only on the other side of the fuel injector, the fuel mist being immediately mixed with a billion hours of CFD precision, then explosively incinerated and promptly scrubbed—traditionally by precious-metal surface catalyst.
On the home front, bleach functions volumetrically, if you are sterilizing water, but otherwise almost every cleaning product is a surface agent. Mix, spread, wipe, fan.
Those VOC-supercharged whiteboard cleaners? Their mission in life is to escape into the atmosphere. Abetted in this task by a large, off-white surface.
But derf, derf, derf volumetric consternation.
Here's the fundamental problem with the human design: you can't judge a cortex by its cranium.
Sometimes the cortex inside contains all the glorious folds of exceptional human achievement, other times (on available evidence) it's just a spherical blob of congealed lipids, with barely enough surface structure to successfully treat hyperventilation by breathing in and out of a brown paper bag.
Apparently, to judge by the available evidence.
(God help the world if Slashdot had permitted me to add that last 'w' to the subject line, which was—apparently—a travesty of insufficient conceptual concision.)
While making a lot of fuss about cars, nobody ever mentions that many many American homes are heated by diesel fuel, and many old European houses are heated by coal. This is on par with Nigeria where everyone gets electric power from a private diesel generator.
Solution is to develop power grids and gas lines. Bug no, we must fight private cars and now private house cleaning products.
The air pollution problem is very region specific. This report is about air pollution in the Los Angeles Basin, which naturally has the most serious such problem in the country. No one burns diesel fuel to heat homes in this area, that is mostly in the Northeast (80%) of such homes, and the number is not all that large, 4% of households nationally and declining.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
...
They've remained where they were or gotten worse with no oversight while the cars have improved their position.
Next you clean up the home products and then something else will take over the top spot as the source of pollution problems. no matter how you clean up each industry there will always be one that is not as clean as the rest. the question becomes once you get down to the absolute major source of green house gas or pollution being a natural process do you try to then regulate that. I know already that in humanity's hubris, they would try to regulate a natural process. We're insane.
No, the household products have been improving. If you live in California you have been seeing products being reformulated and many solvent being taken off the shelves for years, and the same thing is happening to a lesser extent in other areas, so your initial claim is false.
Yes, as you clean one source up others move to the top of the list. That is a natural result of regulatory success. It is not a problem.
The clean-up process is being driven by actual scientifically derived standards for safe air - air pollution levels that are not causing measurable harm to part of the population. In many urban areas of the country due to topography and weather conditions and settlement density they already meet these standards and so are not being subjected to the ever tightening regulations that South California faces. About 60% of the U.S. population does not face any air pollution problems, a fraction that is growing, and also the severity of the problem of those who still face some is diminishing. So we are hardly done with the issue yet. In some parts of the problem stationary sources (home heating, etc.) is still significant, and interestingly enough many of the solutions are actually cheaper (e.g replacing oil with gas) which is driving replacement even without regulation.
In the 40% of the country that still has issues we are no where close to the point where natural pollution sources dominate. So you are declaring "we're insane" based on something you are imagining.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
What I love is the asshole phrase "found that as much came from industrial and household products."
So the real story is that industrial air pollution overtook automobile air pollution in LA?
Thanks for the horse shit pie, Beau.
Thank you. Holy shit, that title is crappy clickbait.