Clean up trash without chemicals free#

“I can imagine there could be deep caves where there’s been very little air exchange for a long time,” ApSimon says. So even if the air there is likely the cleanest, it’s by no means pristine.ĭeep caves, too, could contain relatively pollution-free air, so long as they didn’t have much circulation with the outside world. The South Pole, therefore, probably contains the cleanest air on Earth given its remoteness.īut as ApSimon points out, there’s still a massive pollution-caused hole in the ozone layer hovering over Antarctica, and deposits of black carbon can be readily spotted on that continent’s snow. While pollution does move around the world, there is less mixing between the hemispheres due to barrier-like wind patterns. In general, the Southern Hemisphere’s air is better than the Northern Hemisphere’s, just by virtue of the fact that fewer people live there. That said, however, there are places where the air is cleaner. “One thing we see very often is that pollution starts off in one place but ends up somewhere very far afield,” says David Edwards, director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research Earth System Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. Pollution expelled into the air gets transported vast distances by winds and atmospheric currents. As Helen ApSimon, a professor of air pollution studies at Imperial College London, points out, this means “you don’t necessarily get away from air pollution by being further from the sources”. Others, like methane, are less reactive and may circulate the globe for years until they are eventually broken down or find their way to the ground via snow or rain. Some of these pollutants can linger for months. When carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and other primary pollutants (those that are injected directly into the atmosphere) find their way high into the atmosphere, they often get transformed through chemical reactions into what scientists refer to as secondary pollutants.

In terms of human health, outdoor air pollution costs an estimated one million lives per year, while air pollution produced in homes – usually a by-product of cooking fires – kills around two million people annually. In India alone, ozone pollution causes crop losses equivalent to $1.2 billion per year. And its impact on human health and the environment can be severe. Smog is mostly composed of particulate matter and ozone – a greenhouse gas that forms when nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds produced by cars and industrial plants react together in the presence of sunlight.

Clean up trash without chemicals free#

Might there be some last holdouts free from the taint of our pollution? Answering that question works best if we break down the environment into four realms – the sky, land, freshwater and ocean.Īir pollution comes in many forms. Shredded tyres and plastic bottles punctuate the vast expanse of the Gobi desert plastic bags ride the currents in the middle of the Pacific and spent oxygen canisters and raw sewage mar the snows of Mount Everest. Visit even the most remote outpost on the planet and you will witness this first hand. Wherever we go, we seem to have a knack for leaving our rubbish and waste behind. While nature sometimes produces its own damaging contaminants – wildfires send up billows of smoke and ash, volcanoes belch noxious gases – humans are responsibile for the lion’s share of the pollution plaguing the planet today. Pollution, by definition, is something introduced into the environment that harmfully disrupts it. But fire also marked another important first for us: the invention of man-made pollution. Anthropologists often cite this event as the spark that truly allowed us to become human, giving us the means to cook, keep warm and forge tools. Somewhere between 1.8 million and 12,000 years ago, our ancestors mastered the craft of fire building.