Toxic air pollution in London exceeds WHO guidelines

28 comments
  1. The very wordt pollution is around the major railway stations in London where diesel trains sit in the station with their diesel engines idling

  2. This doesn’t surprise me, I used to visit London fairly regularly to see friends, and you can smell it in the air when you don’t spend all day every day living in it.

    London and to a much lesser extent Birmingham are the only two places I’ve been to in the UK where I’ve immediately noticed the difference in air quality.

  3. Don’t tell that to the ULEZ denialists. We should all suffocate so they can drive their shitboxes to the shop around the corner

  4. Meantime you have idiots breaking ULEZ cameras.

    Breathe it in Londoners, breathe it in. The good news is your PS5 won’t be affected so we’ll wait for the air to clear and go and take it after you’re gone.

  5. For comparison I live outside Beijing and the air quality has hit over 1000 on the AQI. It’s a major factor for us leaving it’s disgusting.

  6. And yet it appears that Londoners are happy with this, due to all the protests about the ULEZ

  7. To keep things in perspective, pollution in London hasn’t suddenly gotten worse; rather it’s that in late September last year the WHO *drastically* changed their guidelines on NO2. Everywhere was within the old targets.

    **Old targets:**

    – 40 ug/m3 annual mean

    – 200 ug/m3 1-hour mean

    **New targets:**

    – 10 ug/m3 annual mean

    – 25 ug/m3 1-hour mean

  8. You’ll get an exceedence of a number of WHO guidelines on air pollution inside properties up and down the UK.

    Indoor air is invariably more polluted that outdoor air and good luck to anyone who has a garage connected to their house, enjoy your BTEX.

    The data from the article is actually pretty crap – a few diffusion tubes, usually located at busier locations is unlikely to get a robust dataset.

    Over the past century we have waves of setting standards, meeting those standards through legislation and other measures, then setting stricter standards, then introducing newer measures – health and environmentally protective criteria typically get tighter over time.

    It’ll be the PFAS that gets you anyway.

  9. Still wear an N95 mask into London as have loads left from Covid

    Kind of good to avoid getting respiratory illnesses, but also avoid pollution

  10. Probably because the ULEZ approval requirements were made up at 4pm on a Friday, which is why a 4.0 litre V8 petrol can put out over 250g / km of Co2 and be ULEZ certified but a 1.3 diesel that puts out barely 130g / km of Co2 is condemned to scrappage. It’s a logical as VED, which similarly must have been made around the same time of day.

    Emissions zones eligibility should be based solely on the European Union’s EURO emissions standards, a categorisation that works exceptionally well in Germany and in France in particular – a system that doesn’t penalise lower income motorists, acknowledges that maintaining existing vehicles to the end of their servicable life and then transitioning is infinitely better than premature scrapping for the sake of it, actually does curtail emissions in built up areas and isn’t designed inherently as a revenue generating, token green wash scam like it is in the UK.

  11. Isn’t one of the main drivers of ULEZ’ partly to push the manufacturers to produce cleaner vehicles? The point being that vehicles are being built ANYWAY, so nudge the market to build clean ones. Non compliant vehicles don’t magically get scrapped, they get sold on, and on again, until they die. Some people may have to take a hit, some people might get priced out, or more likely the extra lease costs of a compliant van/car are about the same as the charge. Couple of years down the line, compliant cars will be on the 2nd hand market. I just don’t see it as a problem, I see it as a win/win. Certainly noticed the pollution levels in town are nothing like as bad as a few years ago I was wearing a mask years before covid to filter the gunk, don’t need to now.

  12. Isn’t one of the main drivers of ULEZ’ partly to push the manufacturers to produce cleaner vehicles? The point being that vehicles are being built ANYWAY, so nudge the market to build clean ones. Non compliant vehicles don’t magically get scrapped, they get sold on, and on again, until they die. Some people may have to take a hit, some people might get priced out, or more likely the extra lease costs of a compliant van/car are about the same as the charge. Couple of years down the line, compliant cars will be on the 2nd hand market. I just don’t see it as a problem, I see it as a win/win. Certainly noticed the pollution levels in town are nothing like as bad as a few years ago I was wearing a mask years before covid to filter the gunk, don’t need to now.

  13. No city should have airports surrounding it. London has 4, at the worst possible locations…

    Stansted north/east, Gatwick south/east, Heathrow south/west, Luton north/west. Any and every direction the planes fly over the city, and the wind (carrying toxic byproducts of aviation fuel) blows towards and settles over greater London. Which is also encircled by the A406, and the M25.

    I’m unsure what the solution is but I know it’s not making people who can’t afford new cars pay more road / vehicle taxes.

  14. ULEZs might help but it is also perhaps time to acknowlegde that cities the size and density of London are not a good idea generally an that we need the UK to be less centralised around it. London keeps getting bigger and more populated, even a city-wide ULEZ would not help when the population and urbanisation of the area is out of control.

  15. Was just in London recently and never noticed any pollution tbh. Infact was cleaner than most other cities I have been to in the last year.

  16. There is some sort of justice in the way we pollute.

    Many (stupid) business owners tought they could keep on throwing away any kind of polluant in the water, because “MuH whO caRes aboUt EcolOgy”.

    Now, the worldwide water cycle is polluted with stuff we’ll never be able to clean. All the children of businessmen and aristocrats are getting poisoned the same way we’re all poisoning ourselves with food and water.

    What an awesome job we did as a species.

  17. I can see the London skyline from the hills around me. On some days the buildings are really clear and easy to spot. I say some
    Like 5 or 6 in a year. The rest it’s murky to some degree. That’s not all pollution but a good amount is

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