Hi, this is Julián from MinuteEarth.
The pandemic had some surprising effects on our air quality.
As the world locked down, traffic and air travel nearly ground to a halt, and many factories
shut down.
As a result, outdoor air quality improved: five months in, the amount of particulate
matter and nitrogen dioxide dropped by 31% and 60% globally.
But most of us weren't out and about in the fresh-er air.
Thanks to remote working, learning, and socializing, we've been at home - indoors - a lot more;
an average of 20% more early in the pandemic.
And while outside, nasty airborne stuff can disperse and be carried away by wind or rain,
inside, it’s trapped - especially as we build ever-more airtight homes for energy
efficiency.
As a result, pollutants can build up and they are often 2 to 5 times more concentrated in
your living room than on the street right outside.
Plus, while at home, we’ve been inadvertently doing more of the things that release the
worst of these toxins, like cooking, which we’ve been doing twice as much as we were
pre-pandemic.
Many of the fuels we cook with can release dangerous gases or fine lung-coating particles,
sometimes at levels more than 100 times higher than is considered safe.
And many cooking methods – even just burning your food, which I count as a cooking method
– can release cancer-linked particles from the food itself.
We’ve also been scrubbing down every scrubbable surface in our homes with every cleaning product
we can find in an effort to keep our homes virus-free.
But ironically, all this cleaning has made our air dirtier.
That’s because some of the chemicals in these products can react with other cleaning
products, dirty surfaces, or chemicals already present in the air to produce some pretty
nasty pollutants.
For example, ozone in the air can break apart the carbon-carbon bonds in some molecules
that make up the cleaning products.
The fragments then quickly combine with oxygen or other compounds to form pollutants like
formaldehyde.
All this sounds pretty scary, especially when you consider that, even before the pandemic-inspired
rise in cooking and cleaning, a study of air quality in US homes found that in a worst
case-indoor-air scenario, the cancer risk would be “unacceptable at US hazardous waste
sites.”
Yeesh.
Over the past few decades, we’ve become more awair of the risks of indoor air pollution.
And the respiratory dangers posed by the COVID pandemic may well be the push we need to make
long-overdue changes to our habits and the places we inhabit, which should help us all
breathe a little easier.
Want an expert opinion on how to improve air quality in your house?
We did too!
So I asked our sponsor Lydall, whose mission is to create a cleaner, quieter and safer
world.
They recommend opening windows or doors to bring in fresh air, using air purifiers with
HEPA filters, and putting a MERV 13 or higher filter into your heating or air conditioning
system.
These filters trap microscopic particles, including bacteria and many viruses.
Even pre-pandemic, I used them here in Montana to trap ultrafine soot during fire season!
We’re glad to be sponsored by Lydall because they’re one of the world’s only manufacturers
of filtration material for N95 and surgical masks; last year, they supported the production
of nearly a billion face masks.
And now, they’re using their new Filtration Center of Excellence to advance filtration
science to continuously improve standards for air quality all around the world.
You can learn more at lydall.com.
From the top of our lungs, thanks Lydall!