We must extend the School Streets principle to nurseries

Amid some incredible recent progress in tackling children’s exposure to toxic air pollution – most notably through the establishing of School Streets schemes – the plight of nurseries seems to have been a little overlooked.

I don’t see conspiracy here, but it’s unfortunate given that children in nurseries are most likely to be in areas of high air pollution – a shocking 53% according Defra/DfE data. We know that children are the most vulnerable demographic, but of these nursery-age children are arguably the most at-risk given, amongst other things, their early stage of development.

But it’s also worth noting that unlike schools, nurseries remain open throughout the holidays, meaning that even if they happen to benefit from being located in an area covered by a School Streets scheme during term-time there are lengthy periods when they are not.

Clearly the fact that the majority of nurseries are privately-owned (a topic in itself worthy of much discussion) is a complicating factor, which means for example that it’s not always possible to make them subject to the same local authority-led interventions that many schools can be.

My own child’s nursery seems set up to facilitate pick up and drop off with a car, while actively discouraging parents and children arriving on foot or by bicycle. It is surrounded on three sides by a car park, and has no direct pavement access nor bike parking. Obviously staff face the same constraints which does nothing to help when you’re looking for them to lead by example.

The fact that cars can simply pull up directly outside the front door and idle is clearly unacceptable. Just imagine the outrage if this was a school! And it happens far too frequently to overlook. When challenged it’s clear that such behaviour arises from a complete ignorance about the dangers of vehicle-caused air pollution rather than parents actively seeking to poison their offspring and stunt their development. And that’s quite apart from the self-evident dangers of children being hit by moving vehicles.

The exchanges that result often also reveal some misconceptions that still need a lot of challenging. The most pervasive is that the interiors of cars and buildings protect against polluted air rather than actually concentrating it.

Suffice it to say it has been a dispiriting task trying to confront this problem on my own yet that is the position I suspect parents of nursery-age children across the country find themselves in.

To be fair to my child’s nursery it has responded positively to my recent call for assistance and has agreed to display anti-idling signs in doors and windows as well as considering further steps. At least I have something to point out now, rather than coming across as an obsessive making random, arbitrary requests!

Is engine idling outside your child’s nursery any different to this?

But I’m under no illusion that this will on its own be sufficient. Nurseries across the country desperately need a School Streets level of awareness-raising to help ensure that our children get the best start in life. A campaign in short that says idling around nurseries is akin to blowing cigarette smoke in your child’s face.

NO2 levels twice legal limit on diesel passenger trains

It may seem like an odd time to be writing on this particular subject given the upheavals and deprivations of the Covid-19 pandemic. But like many people my thoughts are increasingly turning to ways in which the world *could* actually be made better for people when all this is over.

One thing in particular that I’ve really appreciated is the tangible improvement in air quality with 70%+ falls in traffic on the roads. The data tells us its cleaner, but you can taste and smell it. Of course we may – if we don’t fight for it – quickly lose this when life begins to get back to normal.

It was while pondering this that I began to reflect on some of the issues I’ve been tweeting about since starting my personal air monitoring project. One in particular is a source of regret – regret for not having had the time or focus to follow up on.

On the evening of April 23rd last year, I tweeted readings from a rail journey from Thirsk to London’s King’s Cross earlier in the day, which appeared to show prolonged high levels of nitrogen dioxide or NO2. The return journey to Thirsk is one I have made around three to four times a year for the past few years in order to visit parents in North Yorks. Unfortunately it is a route served only by old diesel InterCity trains (its terminus is Sunderland), which is particularly incongruous while travelling on the electrified East Coast Main Line section of the route up to York. It’s also – I might add – a considerably cheaper means of travelling from London to York when compared to LNER.

This was the first and only time I’d had the presence of mind to carry my Plume Flow personal air quality with me on the journey and while I was expecting to see the presence of NO2 I was shocked at the results. I guess I was blithely expecting some kind of mitigation to be employed. After all, there are limits to the extent of air pollution you would wish to expose yourself to – especially with a young child in tow.

I tweeted a pollution heat map visualisation of the journey at the train operator Grand Central who pointed me towards a customer services link, which only provided a postal address for non refund feedback. What I was slightly more perturbed by was the silence from some of the air pollution campaigners/groups who I’d tagged. The problem with highlighting air pollution on any kind of public transport is that it just doesn’t fit the narrative. It’s an inconvenient truth. I want to see many fewer cars on the road as well – and not just for air pollution reasons – but I don’t think that should come at the expense of pulling our punches when it comes to highlighting all serious forms of air pollution. Anyhow, in part owing the lack of response I put the issue to one side.

I came back to the readings having recently discovered that Plume Labs had now enabled users of its Flow – via the phone app – to download minute by minute data from their devices. Not only does this allow users to look forensically at Plume’s own indicative Air Quality Index readings, but also actual readings for PM2.5, NO2 etc in micrograms per cubic metre (ug/m3) and parts per billion (ppb). This allows direct comparisons with World Health Organisation/country recommended limits for mean hourly and annual exposures.

The data showed that for 108 minutes of a journey that normally takes around 150 minutes NO2 levels were in breach of the WHO/EU/UK hourly limit of 200 ug/m3, with a high of 421 ug/m3 and a mean of 354 ug/m3*. The annual mean for the above is 40 ug/m3 and the EU further stipulates that a maximum of 18 hourly breaches in a year. While it would be nice – as with any science – to repeat the measurements, I’ve no reason to believe this journey atypical.

Why does any of this matter? NO2, along with fine particulate (PM2.5), is considered the most harmful constituent of air pollution associated with transport. It irritates and inflames the airways and is believed to contribute to and exacerbate a number of conditions such as asthma. Furthermore, it contributes to a figure of up to 40,000 premature deaths in the UK each year from air pollution; in 2015 a study by experts at King’s College London found NO2 alone was responsible for almost 6,000 early deaths in London each year.

The above figure is believed to be much improved as policymakers have targeted diesel cars, which are the main source of NO2 pollution. Indeed the sale of new diesel cars has plummeted. However, when it comes diesel trains the same levels of concern and policy response seem to be largely absent. Instead of replacing ageing high speed intercity trains with all-electric locomotives the government procured dual-powered trains, seemingly to allow for the cancellation of electrification schemes. Hardly a future-orientated policy.

I can probably just about justify a handful of highly polluting rail journeys, but for those who have in normal times no choice other than to commute or indeed work on diesel services this level of pollution is simply unacceptable. And as has been widely reported during the current pandemic such pollution serves only to worsen the effects of disease like Covid-19.

ENDS

*This is an approximate reading converted from actual readings in ppb.

Data reveals 24/7 exposure to toxic air

To the extent that most of us city dwellers think about air pollution, my sense is that we think about our personal exposure as being quite limited; perhaps just that time spent on foot (or bicycle) around busy roads as part of our daily routines.

It would be no surprise therefore if thinking along these lines curbed widespread demands for mitigating action. However, the purchase of a personal air pollution monitor around two-and-a-half months ago rapidly disabused me of such notions.

My concern was already heightened by being the dad to a 9-month-old boy, and reading a bit about the unique vulnerability of young children to toxic air: specifically their developing organs and their closer proximity to exhaust fumes. Having grown up in the country, I’m thankful that my childhood asthma was not exacerbated by city air.

But the multiple sources and locations of air pollution revealed by my monitor have come as something of a shock and made me realise that we have to think about the problem in a much more joined up way.

From the point I unboxed my monitor and switched it on the potential indoor sources of pollution were quickly revealed. The first thing it picked up was the burnt dinner. The monitor showed that it had resulted in very high levels of harmful fine particulate throughout much of the house, which took hours to dissipate. While we’ve been careful to try to avoid burning the dinner since, the reading has proved accurate – frying food in particular, tends to produce high to very high levels of fine particulate.

And while the outdoor air in my street – thankfully largely through traffic-free – usually only results in low to moderate readings of fine particulate, this seems to completely change when people stoke up their fire places and wood burners on a chilly day.

Unlike cooking this is something that impinges on the rights of others to breathe clean air and I firmly believe that while regulation has a role to play, levels of awareness and personal responsibility need to be raised significantly. And at a time when people are concerned about energy bills, it seems odd that they should turn to such an inefficient source of heating.

Another largely overlooked and little understood aspect of air pollution campaigns and debate is the impact that outdoor air can have on the indoor environment. Indeed it seems possible, according to the readings I’ve taken, that the impact of indoor air can be much greater indoors, with the design of certain buildings (including ventilation or lack of it) trapping and concentrating toxins. Fine particulate readings I took at Queen Mary, University of London, just around the corner from the busy Whitechapel Road, were considerably higher than those inside, for example.

The principle can be extended to cars and again readings I’ve taken are much higher than those taken as a pedestrian alongside a busy road. This seems to be particularly true in a traffic jam or road tunnel. The idea that drivers might be poisoning themselves to a greater extent than those around them could be an extremely powerful campaigning tool, but at present the academic research to back it appears absent, though former chief scientific advisor Prof David King has described the car as a “box collecting toxic gases from all the vehicles around you”.

Perhaps the most surprising finding for many will be the levels of fine particulate on the London Underground. While readings I’ve taken in other environments have fluctuated wildly from low to very high, levels have never fallen below very high in dozens of readings taken on the Victoria Line and Northern Line (the latter is marginally worse) at both platform level and inside the trains themselves.

Surprising, I guess, because there’s no combustible source – rather it appears to come from the wear of train brakes and wheels, and I suspect, the general lack of ventilation and cleaning. The finding has been confirmed in a recently released study by experts at King’s College London, which says that levels of fine particulate are up to 30 times worse than those along busy roads.

Some have attempted to play down these extremely worrying findings by pointing out that most of us spend relatively short periods of our day on the underground. Setting aside the issue of occupational exposure – which the trade unions should be all over – it simply ignores the multiple sources of exposure identified above which suggest we might be routinely exposed to air pollution throughout the waking day.

I’ve heard it said that it’s unhelpful to talk about the multiple sources of air pollution – because well, it’s a bit complicated and will distract from the need to move to cleaner modes of transport. I simply don’t accept this – people have a right to be informed – not least because in many cases it can empower them to take action to reduce their exposure. For example, my readings suggest taking an electric overground train could halve the amount of fine particulate you’re exposed to vis-a-vis an underground journey. As as I said at the outset, if you realise that you’re exposed throughout the day, it’s less easy to dismiss air pollution concerns. ENDS

***

NOTES

I refer to levels of fine particulate throughout. These levels are determined by Plume Labs’ Air Quality Index or AQI, which is correlated to the World Health Organisation’s recommended air pollutant thresholds. Read more here