Local air pollution begins at home
Box 1 | Cars
Cars are wonderful things. You can go where you want and when. You can travel with friends or family in a weatherproof lounge-room on wheels that whisks you along far faster than you could run. But they do create air pollution.
Lead in petrol
Lead is put in petrol to make older designs of car engine work better – but if it gets into your body it will have the opposite effect. The lead comes from the exhausts of cars running on leaded petrol and it is poisonous stuff. Babies and young children can be badly affected by lead – it can stop their nervous systems developing properly and it can damage their brains. Once lead has found its way into your body it is difficult to get it out again, so it is obviously better to keep it out in the first place. Lead-containing petrol was completely phased out in Australia in 2002, and this change has already helped reduce the problems caused by lead poisoning.
Photochemical smog
Photochemical smog (where ozone is generated) is the main air pollution problem in the larger Australian cities, because of our sunny weather. It is caused by the release of nitrogen oxides, mainly from motor vehicles. Under the influence of sunlight, these oxides react with certain hydrocarbon compounds to form various substances that are toxic to humans and plants. The smog irritates people's eyes, nose and throat, causing considerable discomfort.
Ozone is an extremely irritating and poisonous gas, and concentrations in our cities can exceed recommended health limits for short periods during photochemical smog episodes. The air circulation patterns in some of our cities (where polluted air may recirculate for some time before being swept away) worsen the problem.
(Ozone levels are rising in the lower atmosphere; the destruction of ozone in the upper atmosphere is a quite separate problem, see our Nova topic Earth's sunscreen – the ozone layer.)
All of this is bad news for us and bad news for the planet – so what are we doing about it?
Catalytic converters
Development of catalytic converters has helped reduce pollutants in car exhaust. The converter is a special box that goes onto a car's exhaust system just past the engine. It is sealed on the outside, but inside is a heat-proof block with lots of holes through it – a bit like a big bundle of hollow spaghetti. As the car's hot exhaust gases pass through this honeycomb of holes, they come into contact with a thin coating of precious metal – usually platinum. This coating causes chemical changes to take place in the exhaust gases, which much reduce the pollutants coming out of the car.
But as more and more cars take to the road, even these much cleaner cars are still a major source of pollution. Also, using a precious metal like platinum makes the converters very expensive to produce.
The future
For many years car engineers and scientists have been trying to find a cheap way to replace our very polluting cars with something better. The replacement would have to:
- be environmentally clean;
- be reasonably cheap;
- have a good performance.
Electric cars have been developed to high technical standards – but they do not stop pollution, they just move it somewhere else – back to the power station that produces the electricity they run on! And there is still a major problem with the weight and the short 'run time' of the batteries electric cars have to use.
Other people have tried to use hydrogen as a fuel. Hydrogen is environmentally clean and gives you good performance – but it is very difficult to carry safely.
Another idea is to use 'fuel cells' (a bit like the ones used to power the space shuttle's electrical system). Fuel cells work by producing energy for a reaction between oxygen and hydrogen, triggered by a platinum catalyst. Chrysler in the US is developing a fuel cell system which uses petrol (a hydrocarbon) and provides better fuel economy than a conventional engine – and produces no harmful pollutants.
Box
Box 2. Indoor air pollution
Related sites
How ozone pollution works (How Stuff Works, USA)
How catalytic converters work (How Stuff Works, USA)
Related Nova topics
Which way ahead for hydrogen cars? (Nova: Science in the news, Australian Academy of Science)
Fuelling the 21st century (Nova: Science in the news, Australian Academy of Science)
Page updated February 2012.