Sale of bottled fresh air

Besides, natural pollution, most air pollution in the UK comes from road transport and residential emissions which are said to be tolerable less than 5 on the air pollution scale. Unlike in Sri Lanka, people in the UK spend at least 90% of their time indoors.

by Victor Cherubim

( December 18, 2015, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Everyone carries a bottle of water during the summer for relief from exhaustion during travel in crowded trains and the underground. Have you heard of bottled air, in cans? Is it real or fantasy?

“Vitality Air”, a Canadian “pressured air” company is hoping to sell fresh mountain air in cans and bottles to the Chinese in Beijing after the smog which engulfed the city in early December this year. Parts of China are noted to be cloaked in smog especially during the winter months when homes and power plants burn coal to keep warm.

Selling ice to the Eskimos or special desert sands to the Saudi’s is just like selling air to the Chinese. If China can import food, water, oil and minerals, there is no reason why they shouldn’t have the right to import air.

Business is business for the entrepreneurs at Edmonton, Canada who say there is a huge demand for their product around the world, but especially in China.

Price of Air

Air sells for $14 to $20 Canadian dollars depending on the size of the canister. Why wait days or travel miles to import air from Canada, when it would be cheaper to sell Sri Lankan “Fresh Air” to our friends in China?

It is not really the Chinese at fault for their poor air quality. Northern China is often cloaked in smog, similar to the smog in Southern California some years back. But it was not only in China where they had to wear facial masks to protect them from breathing foul air. Many will remember that most Japanese too wore masks for protection against nuclear reactor disaster.

Poor Air quality

Scientists have different strategies for calculating air pollution. Air pollutants are “ozone, fine particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and total reduced sulphur compounds, or perhaps, a mixture of each”.

Air Quality Index (AQI) is an indicator of air quality that is measured on a scale of one to ten. Monitoring stations around the country report direct measurement indicators of industrial facilities/traffic levels on roads, airports and soon to come homes in the UK.

We are told Heathrow airport pollutes the air to cause approx. 10,000 deaths each year. The decision of the third runway at Heathrow has partly been kicked into the long grass and partly until the London Mayoralty election, due to serious noise and air pollution levels.

Air quality data are essential for assessing public health impact caused by poor air quality. The challenge is to get accurate measurements of air quality. We can examine the “number of person days that a region has unhealthy air”.

Population exposure

“Person days are the number of persons living in an exposed region times the number of days the pollutants exceed a health standard. Person-days give an indication of the population burden of air pollution exposure.

The dust from storms in the Sahara last year (2014) affected southern Europe. The winds from the south and east brought the dust to the UK along with the “unspoken industrial pollution from Europe.”

Besides, natural pollution, most air pollution in the UK comes from road transport and residential emissions which are said to be tolerable less than 5 on the air pollution scale. Unlike in Sri Lanka, people in the UK spend at least 90% of their time indoors.

Indoor air quality

It is not only outdoors but indoor air quality which has a major influence on health comfort and wellbeing. The UK is suddenly awakening to the “Sick building syndrome,” with health inspections of buildings. new and old. From 1 October 2015, every house or flat rented out should have a Carbon Monoxide detector alarm installed, or face heavy fines.

Our approach to air quality in Sri Lanka

I need hardly state that we in Sri Lanka, get easily roused to anger for trivial matters, we have a habit of “arguing over nothing”. We are “the most tolerant nation on earth” when it comes to pollution of our water, the air that we breathe, the noise level on our streets.

We need to give more attention to the quality of our life than the model of our cars we drive.