Air Pollution to Printing Ink

A chorus of car horns, jammed roads and ever rising fuel prices - These problems have become a daily routine for most urban commuters in India. And along with road congestion, city dwellers also have to deal with clouds of smoke from various emissions making our air toxic and difficult to breathe in. To address these problems, India's start-up space is stepping up to the challenge, trying to fix traffic, parking problems and air pollution through creative technology. Some of them are even using pollution to print t-shirts and paint walls, on this episode of Heads Up, meet these innovators and hear their stories.

Read the full story @ NDTV

INR 700 crore (~USD 105 million) Collected in Delhi as Truck Entry Fees and Diesel Cess - No News on Spending

At least Rs 400 crore collected under the "polluter pays" principle in recent times and Rs 300 crore out of the entire pollution cess on diesel sold in the capital since 2008 are yet to be utilised to improve the air quality in the capital.

Though the state government, the pollution control committees and the municipal corporations are flush with such funds following Supreme Court and National Green Tribunal (NGT) directives strictly penalising polluting sources, they are yet to frame concrete plans on how to spend the money .

Experts told TOI that the money shouldn't be spent on day-to-day operations or infrastructure of these departments or agencies but pumped into where it was needed most: improving public transport and implementing tried and tested methods to clean up the air of one of the worst polluted cities in the world. The environment compensation charge (ECC) levied by the apex court on trucks entering Delhi has led to the corporations collecting Rs 395 crores, which has been handed over to the state transport department. Likewise, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC), also under the AAP government, has collected more than Rs 2.5 crore as ECC for waste burning and construction projects violating dust pollution norms.

However, the authorities seem to be dragging their feet on how to implement what NGT and the court had ordered: that such funds should be spent to fight Delhi's air pollution. DPCC is also the custodian of the "air ambience fund" which was created in 2008 to collect a pollution cess of 25 paise on every litre of diesel sold in the capital. The state government has been utlising this fund to subsidise electric vehicles; a part of it has also been used on the odd even scheme. However, about Rs 300 crore of the corpus remains unutilised.

The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has recently opened an account for the collection of 1% pollution cess on the ex-showroom price of luxury diesel vehicles (more than 2000 cc). It is developing a strategy now to invest this amount which will be submitted to the apex court soon. "The money will be utilized for pollution monitoring, control and public awareness. In the last one week since we opened the bank account for this cess, we have collected Rs 3 lakh from various NCR areas. However, Delhi hasn't started levying this yet," a CPCB official said.

Read the full report @ Times of India

Nottingham Drops 33% of CO2 footprint

The local authority set the area a target of a 26% reduction by 2020, but the latest figures mean that the target has been beaten this year. According to the city council – Nottingham is now producing three tonnes less of CO2 per year per person than they were in 2005.

In 2012 Nottingham introduced a workplace parking levy, which saw businesses with 11 or more employees parking on their premises paying the £381 charge. The city council claims the levy, which has 100% compliance rate, has enabled it to invest in better public transport to tackle air pollution and traffic congestion in Nottingham.
Investment

In 2014 the local authority expanded its electric bus fleet to 50 partly thanks to the government’s green bus fund. “A significant part of this reduction – around 13% – is due to the popularity of public transport, cycling and walking in Nottingham. “Certainly, the workplace parking levy is a unique policy in the UK at the moment. But we believe it has the potential to help many cities deal with congestion and air quality issues. It enables us to invest in low-carbon transport, and the fact it provides regulation, and to some extent, constraint on city centre usage are significant things.”
Introduction

Read the full article @ Air Quality News

Urban Heat Island Effect in Chinese Cities

Here’s another way China’s notorious air pollution is making citizens’ lives uncomfortable—it’s making the country’s cities hotter. Researchers have found evidence that the pollution engulfing China’s cities enhances the warming effect of cityscapes, raising the temperature by one degree Celsius. Writing in Nature Communications, they say it’s not the bigger cities that suffer the most, but those with the worst of a certain type of air pollution.

Cities tend to be hotter than countryside areas because of the Urban Heat Island effect—the density of buildings and the materials they are built out of absorb heat and radiation from the sun extremely well, but don’t readily release it at night, keeping the area warmer for longer.

Meanwhile, China’s cities are often covered in a haze, as the researchers call it, that comes from the vehicles, factories, and coal-fired power plants that have driven China’s industrial development, which in turns has triggered a mass migration of citizens from rural areas into cities in search of work. The population regularly manifests as a suffocating smog that can engulf major cities for days.

Scientists have long suspected pollution exacerbates the Urban Heat Island, said Xuhui Lee, a professor at the Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, in a press release. The new finding, based on satellite data, is the first direct evidence that China’s infamous pollution problems are compounding the effect.

But not all pollution is created equal. Fine pollution particles, such as those in the 2.5 PM (particulate matter) range that are normally blamed for damaging health can actually be a protector when it comes to city heat. On the one hand, they cause asthma and penetrate the blood stream and internal organs, raising the risk of cancer and heart disease. On the other hand, those same sized particles actually block sunlight, which can help cool city surfaces.

Larger aerosol particles, such as those generated from road dust, coal burning, cooking stoves and sand—particularly a problem in cities in China’s northwest that are near to the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts—absorb and radiate heat while also being bad for health. The dust carried over from the deserts, combined with industrial pollution, mean these cities suffer the most from a thicker haze and a larger heating effect, compared to the bigger coastal cities. Hami City, population 450,000, has an Urban Heat Island effect three times worse than Shanghai, which has 14 million residents.

Read the full article @ Quartz

Mumbai Dumpyard Fires Made for Toxic Air

Chembur, Ghatkopar and Mankhurd residents breathe the city’s worst air, with frequent fires at the Deonar and Mulund dumping grounds pushing air pollution to dangerously high levels. The BMC’s data only reinforces what citizens and activists have been pointing out for months. Residents have been complaining about the quality of air after repeated fires between December 2015 and March 2016 at Deonar, the city’s largest dumpyard. Air quality has been ‘very poor’, affecting visibility and causing breathing problems and asthma attacks among the locals. 

Month-wise data from April 2015 to March 2016 showed SPM level in Chembur was 700 microgram per cubic meter (mgcm) – the ideal limit being 200 – between December and March. At Bhandup, SPM levels touched 1,000 mgcm in December last year.



Experts said industrial units in Chembur and Bhandup, and a rise in vehicular traffic, intense construction activities and stone crushing could be causing poor air quality. “SPM is bound to be very high in Mumbai because of a combination of a number of particles strung together. The main source for the pollutant is dust from open landfills, open burning and several construction activities in the city,” said Gufran Beig, project director, System of Air Quality Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR). “Last year, the soil was also dry because of poor rainfall and sea breeze allowed dust to be suspended closer to the earth’s surface,” Beig said.

Read full article @ Hindustan Times

Infographic - Waste Overflowing on Roads and from Dustbins in Delhi

@ Times of India

Cloth Masks Provide Very Little Protection Against Air Pollution

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have suggested that in order to reduce exposure to air pollution wearing inexpensive cloth masks could be of only a little help and give you a false sense of security, especially in highly polluted areas. Washable cloth masks are widely used in India and other Asian for personal protection against airborne particulate matter.

"Wearing cloth masks reduced the exposure to some extent," but "the most commonly used cloth mask products perform poorly when compared to alternative options available on the market," said the study by scientists at University of Massachusetts Amherst. In a series of experiments with an experimental mannequin in Nepal, the researchers tested four masks -- one pleated surgical type, two cloth and one cone-shaped cloth with exhalation flaps. They tested for several variables and effectiveness in filtering out five different synthetic aerosol particle sizes plus three particle sizes of diluted whole diesel exhaust, which simulated real-world conditions.



Among the cloth masks, the one with exhaust valves performed fairly well, removing 80-90 percent of synthetic particles and about 57 per cent of diesel exhaust. Plain cloth masks were "only marginally beneficial" they said, in protecting people from particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers, often considered more harmful than larger particles because they can penetrate the lungs more deeply.

"Unfortunately, the least effective two mask types are also inexpensive, reusable and are widely used in developing countries, implying they are a popular consumer choice where pollution mitigation is warranted," the authors noted.

Read the full article @ India TV

Infographic - Honking Problem - Number of Noise Monitors in Delhi = 15

@ Times of India

China’s Thermal Coal Imports Jumped 9% Year-on-Year in 2016

According to the latest issue of the China Resources Quarterly (CRQ) from Australia’s Department of Industry, Innovation and Science. The country took 44 million t over the three months to June 2016 with the majority of that coming from Indonesia. The southeast Asian country accounted for 51% of Chinese imports. In contrast, Australia saw its shipments to China fall 10% year-on-year to 9 million t, while the value of Australian exports fell 18% year-on-year to AUS$509.8 million.

Australian thermal coal exports to China peaked recently at 12.9 million t in 2Q14 but have now recorded four consecutive quarters under 10 million t – with a low of 6.6 million t in the first quarter of this year. The value of exports has fallen from AUS$870.7 million in 2Q14.

The increase in thermal coal exports comes as the Chinese government continues to cut back on excess domestic production. The government aims to eliminate 500 million t of production over the next three to five years. Over the first half of the year, Chinese thermal coal imports registered a fall of just 3.4% year-on-year, a significant increase on the 34.8% decline seen in 1H15. That said, BMI Research believe the effects of government stimulus in driving coal demand, coupled with an easing of production cuts in 2017, will see thermal coal imports “subsiding gradually in the coming years.”

“Weak consumption growth means that China’s thermal coal imports will remain capped around the 108 million t registered in 2015,” BMI Research concluded. “China’s imports peaked at 192 million t in 2013 and we expect 2017 to see a resumption of the gradual contraction in imports.”

Read the full article @ World Coal

Coal Burning Causes the Most Air Pollution Deaths in China

Burning coal has the worst health impact of any source of air pollution in China and caused 366,000 premature deaths in 2013, Chinese and American researchers said on Thursday. Coal is responsible for about 40 percent of the deadly fine particulate matter known as PM 2.5 in China’s atmosphere, according to a study the researchers released in Beijing.

Those figures are consistent with what Chinese scientists have been saying in recent years about industrial coal burning and its relation to air pollution. The study, which was peer-reviewed, grew out of a collaboration between Tsinghua University in Beijing, one of China’s top research universities, and the Health Effects Institute, based in Boston, a research center that receives funding from the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the worldwide motor vehicle industry. The researchers’ primary aim was to identify the main sources of air pollution leading to premature deaths in China.

The study attributed 155,000 deaths in 2013 related to ambient PM 2.5 to industrial coal burning, and 86,500 deaths to coal burning at power plants. Fuel combustion of both coal and biomass in households was another major cause of disease that year, resulting in 177,000 deaths, the study concluded. The researchers also found that transportation was a major cause of mortality related to PM 2.5, with 137,000 deaths attributed to it in 2013. In recent years, Chinese scientists have said that motor vehicle emissions are a leading source of air pollution in cities, although not as great as coal burning. Vehicle ownership is rising fast in China, and officials, carmakers, and oil and gas companies have quarreled over setting emissions standards.

China consumes almost as much coal annually as all other countries combined, and coal burning in the country is the biggest source of both air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, the leading cause of climate change. Chinese cities are among the most polluted in the world. Provinces in northern China, where steel, cement and power plants are common, have the highest concentrations of PM 2.5 in the country.

Read the full article @ New York Times

Inforgraphic - Delhi Transport Corporation Introducing Electric Buses

@ Times of India

Launching Electric Cars in Nigeria

A firm, Carbon Credit Network (CCN) has concluded plans to storm the world with made in Nigeria electric cars through her renewable energy drive. The Chief Executive Officer of the company, Mr. Femi Oye disclosed this at the fourth anniversary ceremony in Lagos recently. According to him, “The technology is already here only waiting for some documentation. CCN is pioneering electric cars in Nigeria, starting with our tricycle cars to advanced luxury cars. The good thing about it is that they are not imported, they are to be manufactured here.”

Oye, who recalled that he set up shop few years ago with less than N100, 000, said the company has recorded some milestones. “Today, it is a multibillion naira organisation as a result of the contributions of partners across the globe,” he said. While reeling out the achievements since its inception, he noted that over three million Nigerians have benefitted from the impact and opportunities created directly or indirectly from over 45, 000 entrepreneurs created in the last four years.

While noting that over 70 per cent graduates are out of jobs across the country, he urged the Federal Government to create the enabling environment to allow entrepreneurs to thrive. We have over 45, 000 active entrepreneurs talking about our business every day. Each of these entrepreneurs has a family of about six to seven people that depend on them. If we have like six other companies doing this too, government can raid in taxes to build infrastructures that we need,” he said.

While speaking on the CCN plan to establish a bio-fuel refinery in Nigeria, the CCN boss said his company has seen a lot of economic opportunities in what the world calls a monster waste. “To militate against the effect of food security we cannot continue to produce fuel when the world is going hungry. We are losing over 100 thousand women yearly to indoor air pollution from black carbon that is why we decided to do something differently.”

The event tagged: ‘Renewable Energy and Economic Development: Impact and Opportunities’ had academia, environmental experts, financial experts, community women, banks and civil society groups.

Read the full article @ The Nation

Why India is Still Looking for a Perfect Cookstove

This is a long article from Caravan Magazine

ON MANY MORNINGS, especially in winter, a pall of smoke hangs over the villages of Palwal district in Haryana, a landscape of tractors, brick kilns and new colleges. It’s the haze of thousands of hearth fires burning in the courtyards of homes, boiling dal, baking rotis, and producing fine particles of soot and other pollutants at levels as high as that of Delhi—arguably the world’s most polluted city, only a few hours’ distance from here.

Indian cities don’t have perfect services. Electricity may vanish for hours, and piped water is supplemented by tankers. Yet the urban elite can take one thing for granted: cheap cooking gas. Those who’ve grown up and live in well-off city homes can hardly imagine life before LPG: the long hours over slow stoves, the smells of kerosene and coal, the smoke of wood and dung. But the kitchen life of their grandmothers is still the kitchen life of millions of women in villages across India.

MODERN EFFORTS TO IMPROVE upon India’s traditional mud stoves date back to the late 1930s. A well-known early re-design was called the Magan chulha, after Mohandas Gandhi’s Magan Institute in Wardha. Less than a decade later, the Hyderabad Engineering Research Institute came up with a stove that would, it promised, give women “five freedoms”—freedom from smoke, soot, heat, fuel waste, and the risk of burns. But it wasn’t until the 1970s, a decade of economic and energy shocks, that the hearth came under real scrutiny. Two years after the 1973 oil crisis sent petroleum prices skyrocketing and exposed the dangers of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, the researcher Erik Eckholm called attention to what he saw as an equally important but neglected energy problem: the scarcity of firewood for the poor. “For more than a third of the world’s people,” he wrote in a 1975 paper, “the real energy crisis is a daily scramble to find the wood they need to cook dinner.”

Titled “The Other Energy Crisis: Firewood”, Eckholm’s paper drew a grim, Malthusian picture. The world’s ever-increasing poor were consuming firewood at unsustainable rates. Wood prices were rising, villagers had to walk farther to find firewood, and “in some Pakistani towns now, people strip bark off trees that line the streets.” The consequences were no less than the “suicidal deforestation of Africa, Asia and Latin America,” and the diversion of manure from fields in such quantities as to affect food production. “Without a rapid reversal of prevailing trends, in fact,” Eckholm warned, “India will find itself with a billion people to support and a countryside that is little more than a moonscape.”

In 2002, an evaluation by the National Council of Applied Economic Research indicted the programme for ineffective stoves, a lack of follow-up, and low participation. Irregularities and corruption were found in the distribution system. That year, the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources—upgraded from department status in 1992—shifted the programme’s administration and funding onto state governments. In 2004, the initiative was formally closed. By then, the ministry had approved more than 30 models both fixed and portable, and spent an estimated $32 million to distribute 34 million chulhas. It had been one of the largest stove programmes in the world.

As for Madhu Sarin, she had long stopped being the “chulhawali.” She’d had run-ins with “technocrats and engineers,” and gotten “knocked off government lists.” Most of all, a drought in northwestern India between 1985 and 1987 made the whole enterprise seem foolish. On a survey of Nada stoves in Dungarpur, Rajasthan, she found most of the able-bodied people had migrated for survival; in one home, she met an old man and his infant grandson sharing a single roti. “And I was asking them about improved stoves.” She moved on to work on larger issues of poverty and community forest rights, including the right of village women to collect fuelwood. As for clean cookstoves, she came to the conclusion that structural problems couldn’t be solved with single-point interventions. “Designing a smokeless biomass chulha,” she said, “is in some ways more complex than designing a nuclear power plant.”

TUCKED IN THE RAIN SHADOW of the Western Ghats, Pune is green and cool for much of the year. But under summer’s glare, the hills turn brown and the trees wither into sticks, dry as tinder. Many small firms cluster here, within easy reach of both Mumbai and the rural hinterland, including enterprises making clean stoves for the Indian market.

As India’s stove programme was running out of energy through the 1990s, concern over dirty stoves simmered in the international development sector. This culminated in the launch of the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air, in 2002, by the US Environment Protection Agency and the World Health Organisation. Interest and funding was sustained by emerging research on the health effects of indoor air pollution, and a new attention to women’s rights exemplified in the 1995 UN conference on women in Beijing.

At our interview, Smith said he hasn’t given up on the clean cookstove Until a Honda or BMW tries and fails, he said, there is still a chance of a technological breakthrough. “And if they fail, then that would tell us something too, that maybe there’s no point in solving the biomass problem.” Some stove promotion efforts have done well, when customised and closely monitored. And he was hopeful about a new fan stove from the US start-up BioLite, which has low emissions and an electricity-generating component for charging mobiles—a neat way of appealing to the men of the house.

In the meantime, Smith said, “we’ve got to make what we know is clean available.” He was encouraged by the Indian government’s new experiment with direct cash transfers for its LPG subsidy. This, he said, could help target the subsidy directly at the poor, instead of selling the gas at lower prices to everyone, and the money freed up could then help expand gas coverage. In December, LPG customers across the country received notices about the cash transfers, asking those who could afford it to give up the subsidy and give the “gift of good health particularly to womenfolk exposed to high levels of indoor pollution.”

Expanding electricity and gas coverage to the poor would mean greater consumption of fossil fuels, and, especially with India’s high reliance on coal-burning power plants, an increase in greenhouse emissions. That may not go down well with climate-focused agencies, and trade-offs are antithetical to technological panaceas. But, said Smith, “I’m a health man, not an energy man.” After 30 years, he takes the long view. “The history of modern innovation tells us about the problems we choose to solve. When did we learn human waste was bad for you? Have we fixed it?” he asked. “First, you have to know it’s a risk and accept that it’s a risk. And that still doesn’t mean you know how to fix it.”

Read the full article @ Caravan Magazine