This is Chain Reaction, a podcast from the American Chemical Society, where we link chemistry's past to its future. I'm your host, Margot Wall. And I'm Sam Jones. Sam, have you ever heard of Black Wednesday?
SPEAKER_05I've heard of Black Friday, of course. Uh, and also Black Tuesday, where a Wall Street stock market crash kicked off the Great Depression. Yep. But Black Wednesday, no idea.
SPEAKER_07Okay, so on a Wednesday in July of 1943, a thick brown smog blanketed Los Angeles, causing eye irritation, low visibility, and damage to plants. It wasn't really clear what caused it, and in a panic, some thought it was a gas attack by the Japanese military. This was during World War II. Right, right. So what was it? Well, the day after Black Wednesday, the city blamed the smog on a local plant that manufactured butadiene, which is a gas needed to make synthetic rubber. And not long afterwards, the company stopped production. So the smog went away? Nope. Nope. Um, which left people wondering, okay, what is really causing this? And there were a few chemists that really helped piece together an understanding of what this smog was. There was Ari Hagen Schmidt, who was a professor at the California Institute of Technology, that figured out that a big part of the smog was this thing called ozone. Uh, and that came from byproducts of hydrocarbon emissions, primarily from cars that then reacted with sunlight. There was also Arnold Beckman, a professor at Caltech, who is a chemist and a prolific inventor. And he built an instrument that could reliably measure ozone.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so I feel like we've all heard of ozone as it relates to the hole in the ozone or the thinning of the ozone layer to be more accurate. All I really know is that we wanted in our stratosphere to absorb the sun's UV rays, but not so much down here in the troposphere where we breathe it in.
SPEAKER_07Exactly, exactly. So obviously, events like Black Wednesday are bad, uh, but they can often help bring the problem of pollution into public consciousness. Right. And I guess also the consciousness of chemists. Yes, yes. So today we are kicking off a mini-series all about pollution. What causes it, how we study it.
SPEAKER_02They are questions that concern everyone. But to scientists, they are more than questions, they are challenges, challenges that must be met with answers.
SPEAKER_07As you may have guessed, Sam, our first episode is about air pollution.
SPEAKER_04Air pollution?
SPEAKER_03That's right. Nothing is more important to you than the air you breathe. Of all the threats to our environment, air pollution is the most serious and perhaps the most difficult to solve. There are ways to restore the damaged land. We can purify our drinking water. But we must breathe the air as it comes to us. And every day it comes to us more heavily burdened with harmful and sometimes dangerous pollutants.
SPEAKER_07Some air pollution you can see, like smog, some you can smell like stinky sulfur oxides, some you can feel as it burns your eyes and skin, but some are undetectable with our five senses. Chemists, however, can detect them. And I'm excited to hear how. Yeah, so first we're talking with Pete DiCarlo, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies outdoor air pollution, especially around industrial hotspots like Cancer Alley in Louisiana. And we started with a basic but also complex and very important question. What is air?
SPEAKER_01Air surrounds us, you know, the people like us who live on the Earth's surface. And what we're really interested in is understanding what that kind of trace amounts of other molecules that are in the air that we breathe.
SPEAKER_07So, what are some of the other things that one finds in the air?
SPEAKER_01So, from a climate change perspective, there's the greenhouse gases that I think a lot of people are familiar with. And so these are kind of somewhat trace amounts, CO2, methane, and these are kind of in the parts per million level. And then below that, there's a lot of trace molecules that are important from an air quality perspective. Some of them are also really important at the parts per trillion level, things that create the ozone hole, the smells in the air, that air bringing those chemicals to your sensors in your nose and triggering pleasant feelings. Those are basically just chemicals that come from a variety of different plants or other sources that some people actually want in their air. We try to avoid those if we're atmospheric chemists.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Right now we have it's called a pistachiotide in Baltimore. Um I live near the harbor, and that's the kind of smell you don't want around, even if you're not a chemist.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_07So then when did we start to understand what's actually in the air? We don't have to go all the way back to like Priestley and figuring out oxygen, but like in more detail, like the composition of the smaller things in the air and how much of it is around.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I think that's a great question. It depends a little bit about what phenomenon we're talking about. What we're more focused on in in my laboratory is some of those air quality questions and how some of the chemicals in particulate matter in the air that we breathe can lead to health concerns. But the recognition of some of the dangers came from a few big events, I think, in more modern times. So London had a smog event that trapped air pollution in the Thames River Valley, that many, many people died. And you could see a very clear statistical correlation with this increased blanket of smog and increased mortality. And so this recognition that some of the activities that we're doing on the industrial scale can be really problematic for our health and can cause people to die. And so that has really spun into understanding and regulating air pollution.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Did chemists have a role to play in things like us passing the Clean Air Act? And I know that similar things have been passed around the world. Did it help for them to like have a chemist be like, we detect these things and it's at this amount?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. And I think maybe LA is another example where kind of the smog issues in Los Angeles were investigated, and Arnold Beckman and Hagen Schmidt were able to identify that it wasn't kind of coal-burning power plants, which was initially thought to cause some of that smog, but actually a lot of it had to do with automobile emissions and the chemistry that happens in the atmosphere when you have unburned fuel, nitrogen oxides mixing with sunlight in Southern California and creating huge amounts of ozone. And so being able to measure that ozone, which isn't directly emitted, but is actually formed chemically through chemical reactions in the atmosphere, was one of the things that led to initial formulations of the Clean Air Act in 1970 inserted us down this path of really improving the air quality generally across the US.
SPEAKER_07So it seems like that was pretty important. How did he measure ozone?
SPEAKER_01His instrument initially was called the Oxidant Recorder. And what it did was it bubbled outdoor air through a solution and it was a color metric test. And so actually the color of the solution changed based on the amount of oxidant that was in the air. That oxidant was determined to be ozone. And so you could quantify how much ozone was in the air that bubbled through the solution and start to get levels of ozone at a reasonably high time resolution in order to do that.
SPEAKER_07And um, how has instrumentation changed since then?
SPEAKER_01It's gotten a lot more sensitive, many ways a lot more expensive, depending on what kind of instrumentation you're looking for. But we're not bubbling through liquid solutions anymore. We're doing a lot more direct detection or using mass spectrometry to detect really low concentrations in the parts per trillion level of many of these kind of trace gases in the air that we breathe. We're able to identify components of particulate matter and understand what their sources are coming from and really tie that back to how much is coming from cars, how much is coming from chemistry that happens in the atmosphere, or how much is coming from wildfires and at certain times of the year as well. Measurements that we've done in my group in collaboration with Aerodyne Research have looked at a molecule called ethylene oxide. Ethylene oxide we can detect both with GCMS, so gas chromatography mass spec, but also this optical measurement, this tunable infrared laser absorption spectroscopy, which is a very complicated way of saying shining a specific wavelength of light into air and seeing how much of that wavelength is absorbed by the molecule of interest. Something like ethylene oxide has a cancer risk at 11 parts per trillion, which is a very, very, very low concentration. We typically don't think of in parts per trillion. So if people are exposed to that level of ethylene oxide, over their lifetime, there's a one in 10,000 chance that you would develop cancer. So being able to measure molecules at that level is is really, really important from a health perspective.
SPEAKER_07So when you go about measuring air, what are the different types of ways that you collect your samples?
SPEAKER_01So I and many others in my in my field of research love the fact that the outdoors is our laboratory. And so we get to go all over the place to understand what's in the air. And as we know, the atmosphere kind of extends everywhere. And so I think most traditional is what we call stationary measurements. And so these are where you kind of have a bunch of instruments in one place measuring the air outside and the air passes over it. But we also like to use moving vehicles, and this includes aircraft. So, you know, during my PhD, I got to fly on a National Center for Atmospheric Research, C-130 aircraft, with a bunch of other scientists and make measurements of the air in and around Mexico City and look at how emissions from the urban area of Mexico City chemically changed through reactive chemistry as you move away from the city. More recently, my group has been heavily invested in also making mobile measurements, but from a van. And we have a very fond and fun name for our van, Mom and Pop, which we think inspires people's comfort. But it stands for Mobile Observatory Measuring Particles and Other Pollutants. Which is exactly what we're doing. Thank you. I've been I've been holding on to that acronym until I had my very own mobile lab for quite some time.
SPEAKER_07So where do you drive it? How do you decide like where you go?
SPEAKER_01So part of that is is funding and so what science projects we have going on. We have a couple locally in Baltimore that were looking at how the urban environment adds to air pollution. Um, but also making measurements in heavily industrialized areas. And so we've made measurements in Louisiana, more recently in Texas, and before that, a few times in Pennsylvania, trying to understand how emissions move with the wind and can impact communities and lead to health impacts from that exposure.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Um so what is Cancer Alley and why have you been interested in studying that?
SPEAKER_01So Cancer Alley is a large number of petrochemical facilities and other industrial facilities along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. This particular area has something like 200 total facilities. About 180 of those are petrochemical related. It has a higher incidence of cancer than the rest of the United States. There aren't a lot of measurements done in a regulatory framework around this area. And so we have funding to go and understand and make measurements of many of these hazardous air pollutants that are coming from these industrial facilities to understand what's in the air, what are people's exposures in the communities that live around there, and then translate that into health-relevant uh numbers. And so, what is the cancer risk associated with breathing these chemicals over a lifetime? What is the respiratory risk or the neurological risk for breathing these chemicals in these areas?
SPEAKER_07And when you're doing that measurement, what does that look like? Are you driving back and forth?
SPEAKER_01Um The way that we design our measurements is that we drive the same route over and over and over again so that we build up statistics and get a good sense of what is the average concentration in various areas. Uh another thing that we do is we offset our drive time. So we offset the start time by an hour or two every day. And so that way we kind of shift through all of the different hours of the day. And yes, that also means we drive in the middle of the night and it's hard. Uh, we do this for kind of a month at a time. So we'd be shifting through people's sleep schedules over that period.
SPEAKER_07That's intense. Um, what did you find from your measurements in Cancer Alley?
SPEAKER_01So we just had a paper published earlier this week in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And I think one of the main takeaways is the concentration of many of these hazardous air pollutants, especially the ones that cause cancer, are 10 times higher than what is estimated using regulatory models by EPA. So EPA uses a tool called AirTalk Screening Assessment, which takes industry self-reported emissions and puts them into an air quality model. And so we think that ultimately this is just an under-reporting of the actual emissions from these facilities.
SPEAKER_07And um do you think that's by accident? I mean, self-reporting, I guess, maybe not is not the best way to get accurate information from a company.
SPEAKER_01I don't want to say it's completely intentional, but I I think that our our ways of determining emission inventories need to be rethought. And I think we need to do a better job of auditing as well.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, were you surprised when you saw those those numbers?
SPEAKER_01Honestly, not super surprised. You know, I've been making measurements of various chemicals in the atmosphere now for over two decades, and I think everywhere we go, we find more than we are are expecting to based on models. But I will say that I was surprised at the levels of cancer risk that we saw. That that was really eye-opening. And this is a day-to-day lived experience for people who live in these in these places. And I think what we're able to do with the science is kind of back up their stories, their lived experiences. They have friends, family, close relatives that have cancer or have passed away from cancer. And so being able to show with the data that we're collecting that what they're talking about is is real, it's legitimate, and there's science now backing up those stories is helping them communicate to regulators that they don't want any more facilities being built next door to their home.
SPEAKER_06Right.
SPEAKER_01Um, it's it's a hard question. Um, where do you start and stop as a scientist and where do you become an advocate? And I think it's really important for scientists to think about not only the cool science that we do, but how it can be applied more broadly and to the betterment of people.
SPEAKER_05That was really interesting. First, I'd never heard of Cancer Alley. Uh, and second, I thought it was fascinating hearing Pete grapple with this distinction between scientist and activist.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I think you can be both, uh, as long as you're always following the science, obviously. Uh the next interviewee who also studies chemicals in the air is someone who didn't take a back seat during COVID. And he came up with a low-cost method to clean air, which, you know, was a big deal during the early days of COVID. Sam, can I read you a quote from the illustrious Benjamin Franklin? Of course. Okay. I am persuaded that no common air from without is so unwholesome as the air within a closed room that has been often breathed and not changed. I just want to say I'm so glad that we don't write like this anymore. But very wordy. Basically saying outdoor air, not as gross as indoor air without ventilation. Just a, you know, bunch of people breathing their gross stuff into a room and just an exhalation soup. Exactly. And although nearly 250 years have passed since then, our next interviewee would definitely agree with him. Richard Corsi is the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis, and studies indoor air. So let's start out with a question that I'd been thinking about. Whenever I think about pollution, I think about outdoor pollution. But of course there's going to be indoor pollution too. Why do indoor pollutants matter?
SPEAKER_00Well, indoor air quality matters, and the indoor air pollutants associated with indoor air quality matter because of several reasons. I I think the most important one, the one that many people don't recognize, is the tremendous amount of time that we as Americans spend indoors. The average American lives to be 79 years old, and we spend almost 70 of those 79 years inside of buildings. We spend roughly 54 to 56 of those years in our homes. And, you know, think about those numbers. It's it's pretty extraordinary. If we were fish, buildings would be our aquarium. So we should care about the quality of air inside of our buildings. The air pollutants that exist inside buildings are of two different categories, if you will, right? One is our pollutants of outdoor origin. Buildings in the outdoor atmosphere form a continuum. Outdoor air comes in, indoor air goes out. And we have decades and decades and decades of great epidemiological data that indicate that every time outdoor air pollution levels go up, emergency room visits go up, mortality increases, heart attacks increase, strokes increase. What we need to recognize, and we don't recognize enough, is that most of our exposure to that pollution happens indoors. So these studies that use outdoor levels of pollutants and relate those to health effects are really indoor epidemiological studies, more so even than they are outdoor epidemiological studies. We also have sources of indoor air pollutants that add to that mix of outdoor pollutants that come in. And the indoor air pollutants that we're most concerned about tend to be pollutants that we see at very low concentrations, very low levels outdoors, if we can even detect them at all. These are things like plasticizers and flame retardants, endocrine disrupting chemicals, right? Dust, insect dunga, dander from pets, dander from ourselves, and of course respiratory aerosols. And I think COVID-19 shined a big light on the importance of the concentration and buildup of those types of indoor pollutants in buildings.
SPEAKER_07Right, right. So speaking of that, I know that you've been really big into studying indoor airflow and ventilation leading up to 2020 when COVID happened. What were you thinking when you first heard that COVID was on the scene?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's it seems like a hundred years ago and a bit of a nightmare.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_00In January of 2020, I think it was, I saw a BBC article, and uh it was on this strange virus in China that had been detected, and that people were starting to die from. At that time, they were reporting only something on the order of a hundred deaths or so. So it wasn't raising lots of red flags with many people. Over the next month and a half or so, as we started seeing more and more cases of outbreaks and people dying and getting infected and spreading on cruise ships, it became very apparent that we were dealing with an airborne infectious agent. It became apparent not just to me, but to almost everybody that's worked in the indoor air quality field. We had a network, we were all talking to each other, we were emailing with each other, we were having Zoom meetings with each other. And we were all deeply concerned about it and also deeply concerned of the lack of acknowledgement regarding the airborne route from the World Health Organization, from our own CDC. And of course, when the World Health Organization and the CDC don't acknowledge the airborne nature of the virus, then everything down to county public health agencies are not going to acknowledge it because they look to them that that's that those are their go-to golden sources for information, right? So all of us were trying to get the word out. Wear masks, ventilate, use good filters, avoid crowds. Here's what to do if somebody in your family gets sick. Here's the proper way to isolate them in a room. We were trying to put out all of this information, but we were a pretty small voice in an ocean of voices. And eventually people came around to hey, this is an airborne infectious disease, and we're gonna have to deal with it. And the way to deal with it most effectively is to remove virus laden particles from the air. That's pretty simple. Like it it We didn't need a lot of research in that area. We we knew what we had to do, but people were not doing it.
SPEAKER_07So I know that you had a part to play in COVID-19 of designing a low-cost method to filter and ventilate your house. So can you tell me about that?
SPEAKER_00Sure. You know, back to uh everybody in the indoor air quality field was trying to find ways of helping the public. And what really struck me at one point, this was late spring 2020, I had a family member who has a full-time job, a blue-collar job, and he couldn't afford a HEPA air cleaner for his family in their home. It struck me that if he couldn't afford a HEPA air cleaner, what percentage of America can't afford a $300, a $400, a $500 HEPA air cleaner?
SPEAKER_07A lot. A lot.
SPEAKER_00It's a very large swath of America, right? And so I started going for these very long walks and thinking about this and trying to figure out, you know, how can I help people? And one night I started sketching out this idea, which was for a low-cost air cleaner. And the idea was what if we built the walls of the air cleaner out of good filters, right? Not HEPA filters, that would be too expensive. We need to keep this low cost. When looking at the range of the size distribution of respiratory aerosol particles that contain the virus, it appeared to me that MERF-13 filters could do the trick. And if we attached them to a box fan, then we could get decent air flow through the filters. And I had never looked at how much air could be moved by a $20 box fan until that night. And I went online and I was seeing air flow rates that were five, six, seven, eight times the air flow rate through a typical HEPA air cleaner. Wow. We were talking up to 2,000 cubic feet per minute. And I was shocked. I really didn't know that $20 box fans could move that much air. That got me excited because when you put that together with filters in parallel, we ought to get really high removal rates. And it turns out a lot of studies from various universities and even government agencies have now have shown that. This little $65 to $75 box, a fraction of the cost of a much nicer looking but much more expensive HEPA air cleaner, right, can remove so much more particulate matter from the air simply because of the large volume of air we move through those filters.
SPEAKER_07That's so cool.
SPEAKER_00It's been wonderful to see this. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07It's named after you, right?
SPEAKER_00Yes. It's called a Corsi Rosenthal box. Um neither Jim Rosenthal nor I named it that. In fact, when I threw the idea out, I never even built one. I threw the idea out on social media. Jim Rosenthal, who I knew, he's a businessman in Texas. He's very interested in my research and the research of some of my colleagues. He actually made one and he and he put an image of it on Twitter at the time. And he said, This is a coursey box. And I responded, I think I said, if you built it, it's a Rosenthal box. And then Don Milton, who's a very well-known, internationally recognized airborne infectious disease researcher at the University of Maryland, saw our little social media interaction and he said, call it a coursey Rosenthal box and be done with it. And so that stuck, and people started calling that that. I usually call it a CR box now because it's kind of embarrassing to have my name associated with such a simple idea. Jim and I made a pact with each other that we would never make money off of this, but we didn't want other people to make money off of it. So we trademarked the name, which means if anybody else wants to use it, they have to come and ask us for permission. We want this to be something that's really accessible, that people can build themselves or that others can donate.
SPEAKER_07I mean, it's it's amazing how just like a simple idea can be so effective and help out so many people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there there's no good estimates for how many people have built these now. But if you look at the number of people who claim that they're building them on social media, I think it's probably a half a million at least around the world. And Jim and I started a foundation. We get donations from people around the country and companies as well. And we're now handing out grants to schools and school districts across the country to put CR boxes in their classrooms, and that's been really inspiring and thrilling for both of us.
SPEAKER_07So I want to get back to some of your research because we haven't touched on it too much yet. Sure. How do you go about actually measuring the quality of indoor air, like what's inside?
SPEAKER_00That's a great question, and it's a complicated question. So every class of pollutants requires a different type of instrumentation to measure, to quantify what's inside. And the devices we use range from everything from $150 for a carbon dioxide analyzer, which maybe can give us an indication of how appropriate the ventilation is in a space, whether it's a classroom or a workspace, et cetera. $150 all the way up to $800,000 for a good PTR time of flight mass spec. And then there's a whole bunch of instruments in between. Historically, those who work in the indoor air quality field, we've been limited by resources. There hasn't been a lot of government funding to study indoor air quality. And so what we haven't been able to do is to get good real-time analysis of pollutants, how they're changing with time. We tend to take integrated samples that say, you know, over the last eight hours this was the case. And that changed a few years ago when the Sloan Foundation started a study called Chemistry of the Indoor Environment. And they put up $50 million to better understand all the different chemicals and chemical reactions that happen in indoor environments. What that did was attract a lot of outdoor air pollution researchers who've always gotten a lot more funding than indoor air quality researchers, who have really sophisticated instrumentation. And they brought their instruments into buildings. And historically, those of us like me that have studied indoor air quality have never had the, we've had we've had enough money to scratch the surface and see really interesting things in indoor environments that raise red flags, that raise concerns, but not enough money to dig deeper. And when the Sloan Foundation started this program and brought in the outdoor air quality research with the big weapons, the big guns, these great instruments, right, they were actually able to dig deeper and really help understand indoor air quality much better than we had for the last several decades. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07I want to talk about some of the like creative ways that you make measurements. And if you could like maybe go into a couple of the studies you've done and how you've measured the chemicals that are inside in different scenarios.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'll give you a f I'll give you two or three examples. I'm smiling because some of the most fun I had were some of these strange studies that we did. In the 1990s, I had a student, Cynthia Howard, and we got funding from the US EPA to study the release of potentially toxic chemicals from drinking water to indoor air. And so we studied chemical emissions from sinks, from dishwashers, from washing machines, from showering, and from bathing in a bathtub. And that was one of the most interesting parts of that study because we had to try to simulate the movement of a person who would be sitting in a bathtub washing themselves. And so we created a big puppet out of Tedlar bags that we put water in and connected to some string. And Cynthia was above this chamber that we were doing the experiments in, moving the puppet and trying to simulate somebody who would be lifting their hands and sort of splashing water on themselves. So that was that was a really fun project.
SPEAKER_07That's like Home Alone.
SPEAKER_00It's a lot like Home Alone, yes. There was another project in the early 2000s in which I was interested in the chemistry near our heads. And you know, people put on hairsprays or cologne or perfume or even wash ourselves with scented soap. And if there's a little bit of ozone in the environment, that ozone will chemically react with the unsaturated organic compounds in those perfumes and the hairsprays, et cetera. And it'll react with those chemicals as they're coming off of our skin in the air near our face. And so whatever the reaction products are, we'll be breathing them. And so we did some experiments where I designed what I called a near head chamber. It was a beautiful stainless steel chamber that had a little fan at the top that swirled the air around a human head.
SPEAKER_06Okay.
SPEAKER_00And I would go outside my laboratory and I would put on cologne or hairspray or even squirt some perfume on myself. And I would come back into the laboratory and I would sit down in a chair, and this box would be fitted over my head, the fan would be turned on, and the air would slowly move around my head. And my students were injecting small amounts of ozone and doing measurements of particulate matter in my breathing zone. I don't remember how, and I certainly, we hadn't even published anything at that point on it, but somebody told National Geographic about it. And if you pick up the October 2006 issue of National Geographic, there's a two-page centerfold, and the centerfold is me. You can't tell it's me because it's a person with a huge stainless steel box around their head. Um we coined the term during that project, near head chemistry or personal reactive cloud. And those terms have been used by lots of other people now. So it wasn't a big study, but it did generate interest and a lot of really great research after that.
SPEAKER_07Well, that's cool.
SPEAKER_00That was another fun project. And we had a test house at the University of Texas, and about eight years ago or so, the Sloan Foundation funded a very large study using our test house that brought great researchers from around the country, indoor air and outdoor air researchers, who surrounded our little 1,200 square foot test house with big trailers. And we had we had tubing coming in from the trailers and uh all over our test house, measuring just about everything you can you can possibly measure with the most sophisticated instruments. And then we had cooking events and we had cleaning events and we had all sorts of events in the test house so you could see how these events temporarily dramatically changed the indoor air quality in homes.
SPEAKER_07I remember reading about it and that there was a Thanksgiving dinner that you guys implemented. Yeah, tell me about that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so the students had a blast. So we had a Thanksgiving dinner, and it a big table was put out in the dining room of the test house, and Thanksgiving food was cooked, and everybody had while you're measuring the air, right? While measuring the air, correct. And then everybody had a big feast in the house at the after at that point and continued to measure the air as they were eating. Yeah. I was not part of the group that got to stuff themselves. But yeah, but I remember the students were really excited about it.
unknownTrevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_07That's fun. Yeah, what did you learn from something like that? Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00A lot of what was learned is the importance of cooking with respect to your exposure to a wide range of particulate matter. Cooking in in a home will heat up oil enough that the oil will evaporate and recondense into particles. And if you char your food, then you've got particulate matter from that. Any combustion device in an indoor environment will generate particulate matter that can negotiate deep into your respiratory system and do damage to your respiratory system.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I guess that's the the thing about indoor spaces is that in some ways, you know, there are these other pollutants that come up and they get trapped in this concentrated way because there's this barrier between the indoors and the outdoors. But in another sense, it's kind of an opportunity because you can filter air, right? So you have this ability to clean air. How do you think about those like two things kind of counteracting with each other?
SPEAKER_00I think you hit on something so important. We can dramatically reduce population exposure to all forms of air pollution, including outdoor air pollution, right? If we just rethink the design of buildings and how we operate buildings, and it doesn't cost an exorbitant amount of money relative to the construction of a building to do it right, to make sure that we keep outdoor air pollution out, and to make sure that we don't generate much pollution indoors, but what we do generate indoors can be easily and quickly removed from the indoor environment. Those things are not rocket science. We could do them now if we just recognize the importance of indoor air quality.
SPEAKER_05Okay, I've decided I'm never breathing again.
SPEAKER_07Me neither. Starting now. Um obviously, we need chemists to continue to monitor our air indoor and outdoor. We need to know what's out there.
SPEAKER_05Right. And regulations to limit releasing pollutants into the air. And also new chemistry so that if we do emit waste into the air, it's less detrimental to the environment and to us.
SPEAKER_04Unfortunately, there is no simple solution to the problem. The solution will take time and research and understanding. With the help of every group and every company and every individual, we can look forward to the time when instead of saying hair pollution, everyone's complicated, we can say clean air, everyone's returning.
SPEAKER_07On our next episode, we explore pollution in our waters. See you next week. This was Chain Reaction, a podcast by the American Chemical Society. Our executive producer is Sam Jones. Our lead producer is me, Margot Wall. Research was done by Beck Roldon. Fact checking by Michelle Boucher. Production help from Michael David and Matt Radcliffe. The theme song was by D. Peterschmidt. And of course, you can always email us at chainreaction atacs.org.