Pollution from airports could be making you ill

thousands of airplanes Circle above Europe every single day although planes fly high up in the sky they also have impacts on the ground aircraft engines emit polluting gases and particles which affect air quality especially around airports how much do we know about this pollution what are the risks for the millions of people living or work in near airports and what can we do about it let's find it out today we're going to measure air quality near an airport with researchers from the DLR the German Aerospace Center jet engines emit ultrafine particles these particles are a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair which makes them really difficult to detect that's why we've brought the best testing equipment in town here you can see different aircraft that were passing by and as you can see we had a very uh large increase in particle number concentration and here you can see the particle size distribution where we can say that um most of the particles are in the range of 30 NM how do these particles affect human health because of their size ultrafine particles can travel really deep into the lands they can even penetrate cells and enter the bloodstream and then that means that they can reach and impact multiple organs in the human body ultrafine particles are a pollutant of emerging concern in the Health Community and there is a growing body of evidence on the the detrimental effects that they can have on human health according to the World Health Organization exposure to ultra fine particles may be linked to an increased risk of pulmonary cardiovascular and ischemic heart diseases let's now have a closer look at what causes these emissions and how to reduce them we've come to the DLR lab to find out what happens when jet fuel Burns two of the main causes of particle emissions from PL sulfur in a type of molecule called aromatics both can be found in fossil jet fuel also known as kerosene let's see what happens when it burns so on this side we have conventional kerosene burning and on the other side we have a saf of a type hea burning in a identical burning and as you can observe there's more black smoke or suit particles coming out of the flame when you burn conventional kerosine as opposed to the s [Music] we just saw the positive effects of using sustainable Aviation fuels or savs as they have less aromatics and sulfur but savs will take some time to scale up in the meantime we need to clean up the dirty kosine for our planes this can be done thanks to a process called hydr treatment that has been used for years to reduce sulfur in Road and shipping fuels the idea would be then to get faster to those Ben benefits than waiting for the huge amount of saf that we need to to get there so developing the production of saf but parallel to that start also under treating the the conventional fuel we have seen how air pollution from Aviation affects people living near or working at airports and how improving the quality of jet fuel can play an essential role in solving this problem we now know that there are in fact no safe levels of air pollution and therefore for we need data and policies to tackle all the different sources of pollutant emissions and to improve air quality Europe must act now introducing standards to clean up carrent jet fuel and taking other measures such as stopping airport expansions or reducing the amount of flights let's clean up the air that millions of us breathe every day [Music]

Channel: Transport & Environment (T&E)

Views: 385

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Id: TQTXb0GF6cI

Length: 4min 8sec (248 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2024