Household Products Now Rival Cars As a Source of Air Pollution, Say Scientists (theguardian.com) 85
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.
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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.
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Thank you. Holy shit, that title is crappy clickbait.
This is why I only steamclean my house (Score:1)
It's better for the planet and gets out bloodstains without club soda.
Anything to ignore the elephant in the room (Score:2, Insightful)
Livestock pollutes far more. We can take direct action against it by not buying products made from animals and their secretions.
Re:Anything to ignore the elephant in the room (Score:5, Funny)
You're ignoring the cow in the room. By giving us this straw man elephant livestock scenario. There are far more domesticated cows than elephants.
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Re: Anything to ignore the elephant in the room (Score:3)
And it would stay in the environment forever instead of being temporarily taken back out when new livestock is born and grown.
Err ... ahh ... what?
Are you under the strange impression that cows eat methane?
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You mean human livestock, right?
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Weird that you think livestock are being ignored, when 2017 was the year that meat alternatives really started to become desirable products rather than just more ethical replacements. Also the year when the will to really tackle plastic packaging was found. Lots of longer range, nice looking electric cars reached market too.
It's partly down to technology providing us with equally good or better alternatives, and partly down to a backlash against the US withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.
Re:Anything to ignore the elephant in the room (Score:5, Funny)
How can you tell when someone's a vegan? Don't worry, they'll tell you.
No one is ignoring anything. (Score:2)
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.
This is retarded for an obvious reason (Score:1)
"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...
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Many industrial processes have greater economic benefits for society than household products. Think of pollution like investing money; you don't want to spend money or pollute more than necessary, but you want to make sure the money spent or pollution created is going to return the most value.
Also, the study is not recommending that household products should be restricted; it only provides evidence that developing new formulations of household products that do the same job with less pollution could be benef
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Many industrial processes have greater economic benefits for society than household products.
An unpainted house is probably worth a quarter less to potential buyers. Partly due to ugliness and partly due to weather and pest damage that's bound to occur. How much is 25% of the US real estate market?
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Many industrial processes have greater economic benefits for society than household products.
An unpainted house is probably worth a quarter less to potential buyers. Partly due to ugliness and partly due to weather and pest damage that's bound to occur. How much is 25% of the US real estate market?
A house is no less valuable when painted with low-VOC or more environmentally friendly paint that performs equally to a conventional paint. Furthermore, I already said...
...the study is not recommending that household products should be restricted; it only provides evidence that developing new formulations of household products that do the same job with less pollution could be beneficial to everyone.
Keep it up and I'll avoid /. (Score:3, Insightful)
Who wrote this rubbish? Household = Industrial????? Fucking liar. Bait and switch is NOT the way this site will thrive.
Super toxic paint! (Score:1)
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.
I've noticed it too... (Score:3)
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
Is this what slashdot's down to? (Score:1, Troll)
Reading the fucking labels of shower soap?
WTF are you, a houseplant?
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Where I live there's not enough water to go around for extended showers. Saving water has become a big component of the go-green propaganda.
If there's enough water for a shower, there's enough for a super long extended shower [treehugger.com]
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Since I stopped using anything with scents or dyes in it, I've become really aware of anything with perfumes.
I have been sensitive to the poisons used to make perfumes for about 20 years now. My bowels frequently activate if I breathe while close to someone wearing that crap.
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Since I stopped using anything with scents or dyes in it, I've become really aware of anything with perfumes.
I have been sensitive to the poisons used to make perfumes for about 20 years now. My bowels frequently activate if I breathe while close to someone wearing that crap.
Nature provides its own fragrance in defense!
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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
We've gone mostly unscented in our house too. After my wife's spontaneous pneumothorax almost a decade ago, most scents cause her discomfort, and many will trigger a debilitating asthma attack. Like you, she can't go down the household cleaning aisle in the supermarket. and she can no longer pump her own gas.
I'm OK with the cleaning aisle, but the scented laundry products that many people uses make it very uncomfortable to be within 5 to 10 feet of them. Also going outside when one of our neighbours is dryi
I wanna use hairspray! (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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Perfumes (Score:1)
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.
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Less 'this spray makes me sexy' and more 'I don't realise I'm wilting flowers and small puppies'
Says who? (Score:2)
Not a chance (Score:1)
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I wouldn't be so sure that pouring a lifetime's worth of household chemicals in an enclosed space would not be lethal. Household chemicals include ammonia, chlorine bleach, descaler, paint thinner, and ethanol-rich mixtures. Saturated ethanol vapor is anout 3x the lethal concentration (LC50, 4 hours).
Re: Not a chance (Score:2)
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?
No, you would drown.
Ignoring that for a moment, it would be a race to see what kills you first; the chlorine gas from bleach and vinegar, the chloramine vapour from mixing ammonia and bleach, or the massive hydrogen explosion from mixing drano and aluminium. Either way, you're going to leave a fun crime scene for the coroner to investigate.
There is nothing worse for the environment than (Score:1)
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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.
Hell No! (Score:2)
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...
Numbers (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Right, because arable farming is so eco.. (Score:2)
... 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 pro
Alternate interpretation may be. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
. . . that car exhausts have gotten so clean, that outgassing from household and industrial products is now noticeable, instead of being noise in the metrics. . .
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That may be true, but that doesn't convey any information about whether we should do something about it. If you clean up a hoarder's house and find piles of dried feces on the carpet nobody says, "no need to do anything, it's just that the house is so clean that the shit is noticeable now."
Air Fresheners (Score:1)
Alternative headline. (Score:4, Insightful)
Automobile emissions drop to the levels of household products.
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This is an accurate description of what has happened in California. The controls on auto emissions have been very effective and have transformed the natural "smog trap" situation is the Los Angeles basin. In 1968 there were 200 Stage 1 smog alerts and 50 Stage 2 alerts. Stage 2 alerts dropped to near zero in the early 1980s, Stage 1 alerts did the same by the late 1990s. There have been no Stage 2 alerts since 1988 or Stage 1 smog alerts since 2003. And remember this is despite a 50% increase in population.
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You note that the AQMD has focused on VOC emissions out of necessity.
Not to be too cynical, but might that "necessity" actually be "justifying its' continued existence" ?
I smell the Iron Law of Bureaucracy in play. . .
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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.
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...
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
mix, spread, wipe, fan v. suck, squeeze, bang, blo (Score:2)
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