Air Quality In The UK

In the UK, the AQS (Air Quality Strategy) sets out standards for chemical concentrations in the air at specific locations and sets up objective dates for achieving these air quality standards. Such improvements to air quality can greatly improve health and well-being of affected people. The most at risk typically are children, older people, and those with existing respiratory problems so areas chosen for receptors include residential areas, schools and hospitals.

Places with large amounts of local pollution, such as residential complexes, large commercial buildings or bus depots, may suffer from large amounts of pollution from road traffic such as London for example. Steps that have been taken here include electric vehicle infrastructure, the congestion charge and low emission zone, support of hybrid and electric car clubs, better road maintenance to reduce particulates from road disintegration and all new busses in London will be diesel-electric hybrid engines. London is a fairly extreme case however

Other common sources of pollution are industrial complexes with processes such as; fuel refinery and production, metal production and processing, mineral extraction and processes, chemical industry, waste management, treatment, transfer and storage, paper, pulp, board and textile industries and tar and bitumen activities. These processes may have vapour releases or particulates released from tall stacks, storage piles or open area processing. Industrial emission mitigations include scrubbers in the towers and ensuring no local areas may be in risk of high concentrations of chemicals from an industrial site.

Construction sites too need modelling and monitoring of dust, volatile and toxic chemicals and odours which may be produced during. These issues have let to mitigation programmes which can be implemented to reduce emissions from some schemes.

These air quality schemes include:
Dust control with water sprays to dampen the site, full site screening to contain dust, or screening of dust sources.
Covering materials in transit to and from the site to stop dust blowing off vehicles.
Using low sulphur fuel in engines around the site.
Burning waste off site to avoid local pollution.
And noise dampening structures and quiet equipment to reduce noise pollution.

Such measures can be used to great effect to reduce the local impact of development work on the air quality of a community.

Together all of these mitigation methods can be used to drastically improve the quality of the air in sensitive locations. This is fantastically beneficial to the people living in such areas and also to the environment. Why not see if you can reduce the pollution you create on a day to day basis, you might surprise yourself.


The author works for a company who have professional air quality consultants and provide air quality assessments as well as other environmental and ecological surveys