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If Air Pollution Increased Much More, Some Wise Guy Will Try to Purchase It

Essay by   •  February 28, 2011  •  Essay  •  509 Words (3 Pages)  •  1,127 Views

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If air pollution increased much more, some wise guy will try to purchase it

What do we know about air pollution? About the air itself? The 2nd question seems to be much easier to answer to.

 The mixture of gases which consists of 78.08 per cent nitrogen, 20.95 per cent oxygen, 0.93 per cent argon, 0.03 per cent carbon dioxide, with smaller quantities of ozone and inert gases and forms the earth's atmosphere.

 The essential subject for all living beings.

 The substance we are breathing with.

Air pollution is the changing of proportion of these gases by means of adding harmful substances to the atmosphere which results in damage to the environment, human health and quality of life. These harmful substances might be the same gases present in the air, e.g.: carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas but usually are gases normally absent in the air, e.g.: carbon monoxide (CO), sulfur oxides (SOx) especially sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides (NOx) especially nitrogen dioxide, volatile organic compounds (VOC), such as hydrocarbon fuel vapors and solvents, particulate matter (PM), such as smoke and dust. Metal oxides, especially those of lead, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), ammonia (NH3). Odors, such as from garbage, sewage, and industrial processes etc. The list might be continued for pages. So we can find the whole periodic table in the air. The problem is in the concentration of different elements. If the concentration is low then the pollution by this or that element may be unnoticed but if the concentration is high it might lead to grave damage to people’s health, precious artifacts and the nature itself. For example,

 in 1948 in the steel-mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania, intense local smog killed 19 people.

 In 1952 in London about 4,000 people died in one of the notorious smog events known as London Fogs;

 in 1962 another 700 Londoners died.

In the above mentioned cases people died because of the high carbon monoxide concentrations. Then in 1984 in Bhopāl, India, more than 3,800 people died when methyl isocyanate released from an American-owned factory during a thermal inversion.

Today, pollution control is becoming stricter. Every country develops standards and directives which set maximum atmospheric concentrations for specific pollutants. E.g. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in the UK, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the USA, the European Commission

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