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Monitoring Air Pollution: A Citizen’s Engagement

By:  Alondra Cecilia Niño







Fig. 1: Dustbox collection of pollutant P2.5 hourly on heavily trafficked areas

        Pollution has been considered to be one of the leading causes in depleting an environment’s health. With air pollution, human health is impacted along with the environment. Health concerns and deaths related to air pollution have taken a great toll on major cities all throughout the Earth. As an example, it is said that London often sees a death toll of 9,000 deaths related to health complications that arise from air pollution, annually. Through this, citizens are called to follow and monitor any changes in air pollution in their surrounding environments with at home equipment such as dust cloths and have their samples sent to laboratories for further analysis; however, with the upgrade of technology, it became easier to obtain data with low-cost efficient sensors, such as the creation and implementation of the Dustbox. This low-cost tool allows for the continuous monitoring of air pollution in the highly trafficked areas of major cities. The Dustbox was ideally created to monitor the presence of the highly dangerous air pollutant, P2.5 in a given area. After data was collected and followed with a community assessment and analysis, citizens saw alarming rates of air pollution and raised their concerns with ways for the prevention of air pollution.  Preventative measures called for traffic regulation, construction restrictions and formation of green spaces. With the help of the sensors with said regulations, it is the hope for which air pollution can decline along with its related side-effects and deaths. 

 














References: 

Gabrys, J. 2020. Planetary health in practice: sensing air pollution and transforming urban environments. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 7,35



Comments

  1. RocioSeptember 25, 2020 at 11:37 PM

    What an interesting study, I'm glad that citizens became aware of the damage they are doing to our environment and are coming up with solutions to make our home a greener place. I hope we see more Dustboxes around to help us monitor pollution.

    ReplyDelete
  2. M MendezOctober 21, 2020 at 5:39 PM

    This is very interesting that a citizen science project had such an impact on the community. These are great stories to find out about. We need more Dustboxes!

    ReplyDelete

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