How Air Pollution is Becoming Earth’s Foe — Livekaktus

Food and water are essential sources of human’s endurance on earth. But the most crucial thing which you can abide for only few minutes is air. As humans, we inhale over 3,000 gallons of air each day and around 1,095,000 gallons each year. Thus, a huge amount of air is required to sustain everyday’s life. In this thoughtful demand of air, the answer of question “why should we be concerned about air pollution” is merely fair.

Air Pollution

If we simply clarify what is air pollution, the presence of toxins or impurities present in the atmosphere ahead of human are resilience causing health issue to humans is the primitive meaning of air pollution. Whether we concede it or not, air pollution is a real concern, one that keeps on effecting our environment and our lives each and every day. In present time, such a serious problem can’t be spurned as we regular inhale these toxic materials without conceptualizing what damage it is doing to our body.

Sources

The causes of air pollution can be both natural and man-made. Air toxins are mostly gases or small particles which remain suspended in the air for very long time period. It can come from many different sources like factories, power plants, dry cleansers, vehicles, wildfires or windblown. The major cause of today’s pollution is motor vehicles which releases one-half of smog forming erratic organic compounds, nitrogen oxide emissions, toxic air pollutant emissions, carbon monoxide emissions etc nationwide. The most innate source of air pollution has always been ignition process where the pollutant is smoke and automobiles are prevalent player responsible for this. One can wonder how fossil fuels cause air pollution. The burning of fossil fuels in automobiles releases gigantic amount of sulfur and nitrogen oxides which are heavy air pollutants. Apart from automobiles, there is another party i.e. power sector which majorly causing air pollution. As humans are still reliant on fossils fuels for all their energy demands, it naturally releases toxic materials into the atmosphere. For electricity production, coal is burned in thermal power plants which are sloppy among all other fuels.

The world has now shifted to liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons like oil and natural gas to meet its energy demands. Though these fuels are deliberated cleaner than coal but excessive use of these fuels have resulted in increased consolidation of greenhouse gases like carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide etc. in the environment.

How Does Air Pollution Affect Humans?

It is a very common question related to the air pollution. As we inhale so substantial amount of air on daily basis, it definitely has unfavorable affect on our body. Breathing polluted air can make your eyes and nose burn; it can irritate your throat which makes difficult to breathe. It not only cause physical disabilities but also generates psychological and behavioral disorders in humans like headache, asthma, cardiovascular problems etc. Asthma sufferers can be worst affected by polluted hair. Apart from this, heart and respiratory diseases are very common due to air pollution.

Effect of pollution on human health is not meager. Pollution is the cause of numerous type of relapse like strokes, heart issues, breathing problems. When toxic chemicals like benzene or vinyl chloride gets released in the environment, risk of cancer birth defects, lung injuries, damage to brain or nerve can happen. Not only humans, but plants and animals are also got affected by air pollution. Various severe diseases like premature deaths, respiratory failure, and fatal attraction of death are common results of polluted air.

We all are familiar of this term and undoubtedly, air pollution is responsible for this. This phantasm leads to a slow but consistent increase in the temperature of planet. The affect to entire ecosystem is can’t be over sighted which if not gets stopped, can cause severe damage.

Ozone layer is going shrinking due to this issue which reduces its ability to protect us from harmful ultraviolet radiation. The rays are so destructive that it can cause skin cancer and also affect wildlife and plants.

Toxic air pollutants and chemicals form acid rain and it has huge impact on animals, marine system and plants that are soaked in it. It also makes the soil toxic which in result affect humans, wildlife and plants. Not only this, it keeps on damaging our heritage wonders and buildings which is a point of concern for nation’s pride.

Prevention of Air Pollution

So what are the air pollution solutions we can make to insulate the planet? How to control pollution? The prevention and control of air pollution is not an arduous task and requires few of our innovative attempts.

• We can use Hybrid vehicles which produces about a fourth of the pollution of the average vehicle. Many of cities have adopted CNG or battery running vehicles instead of petrol and diesel which is a great step towards prevention of air pollution.
• Rather than using fossil fuels, we can go for using green energy, such as wind power, solar power, hydro electricity, geo thermal power and biomass energy which will make great impact on air pollution.
• We can conserve energy during our day to day work and buying energy efficient lightening and appliances. Paper, plastic, bottles, cardboard and aluminum can be recycled to reduce air pollution.

Conserve energy by choosing reusable products and low polluting models of vehicles which transmit less smog in the environment. Since air pollution has spread its roots into the ecosystem from a long period of time, so the favorable outcome will not come overnight. But the least we can do is make efforts to preserve our environment and ozone layer by taking control on air pollution. Breath safe, live safe!!

Originally published at https://livekaktus.com on July 2, 2019.