Wired technology reviewer Lisa Wood Shapiro is worried that just walking across a carpet will adversely affect her health. At least she says she's worried, because she wrote a whole column about how just walking across a carpet can cause "resuspension" and raise up detectible amounts of "PM 2.5," which are particulates under 2.5 millionths of a meter in diameter. That's pretty small, and not anything you can see with the naked eye. One type of technology she reviews is particulate detectors, and that's how she knows that just walking across even a nominally clean carpet kicks up all this micro-dust.
Being a reporter, she dug up dirt (so to speak) on how PM 2.5 particles can affect your health. Living in a space with air purifiers that cut down such stuff can lower one's blood pressure slightly. And the air purifiers, especially if they use HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) filters, can also get rid of something called PFAS, an array of fluorine-containing compounds that can come in solid, liquid, or gaseous form. PFAS has been linked to cancer and other adverse health outcomes, so anything you can do to reduce your exposure to those chemicals will, in principle, benefit your health.
The rest of her column describes various pricey solutions to the carpet-dust problem, such as throwing out your old throw rugs and replacing them with pure-wool ones, buying battery-powered HEPA-filter-equipped vacuum cleaners, and taking off your shoes when you come into the house. That last one isn't pricey, but on a cold day it's not that comfortable either.
Indoor air pollution caused by my carpets is not high on my worry list, but I'm older than Ms. Shapiro, and some things that don't bother me at all seem to perturb folks under 40. Solid body soap, for instance. The attitude I sense of the younger set toward solid body soap, the kind you have to pick up with your hands and rub under running water to get suds from, resembles the attitude I have toward the "public brush and comb" provided by 19th-century railways in public bathrooms: "Ecch! Somebody else has touched it!" Hence the under-40 set's preference for liquid body soap, untouched by human hands until it touches only yours. I don't know how many germs can make a living off of solid body soap, but maybe some can. It's probably not the actual statistics of germ-spreading from soap as it is just the ideas involved.
And that may be the case for Ms. Shapiro's indoor air pollution issue. It may be partly real, or partly trumped up to give her an excuse to review a bunch of HEPA-filter vacuum cleaners. But all of the above issues are what a friend of mine calls "first-world problems." That is, they arise only when the basics of your existence—what you'll eat tomorrow, where you'll sleep, what clothes you will wear—are taken care of.
Indoor air pollution is a real and deadly problem, but not for journalists living in Maine or Brooklyn. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that household air pollution worldwide led to the deaths of over three million people in 2021, including 237,000 children under five.
We're not talking about PM 2.5 dust raised by walking over carpets. We're talking wood fires built on dirt in a poorly ventilated hut, or maybe a smoky kerosene fire in an old tin can. Cutting wood for fuel is one of the leading causes of global deforestation. If you've ever gone camping and found yourself on the wrong side of the campfire, you know how your eyes sting and you breathe in enough smoke to cause a coughing fit sometimes. Well, what if you have to go through that every time you want a hot meal? That is the situation for many millions of people in Africa and other underdeveloped parts of the world.
Dying is a lot more serious than having your blood pressure go up a few points. What does the UN propose as a solution for household air pollution? They pose a range of answers, but as the answers get better, the cost increases.
Certain kinds of charcoal briquettes make almost no indoor air pollution, but they have to be manufactured somewhere and somebody has to pay for them. Even better than that is an LPG cookstove (liquefied petroleum gas). And even better than that is an electric stove, but the residence has to be wired for electricity.
You will notice that each step away from the pollution problem involves increasingly complicated infrastructure: manufacturing and distribution of charcoal, transportation and storage of LPG, or an entire electric grid powered by something or other. The anti-fossil-fuel contingent would have the electric grid powered by renewable energy. And yes, that would be ideal. But in a place where there is no electric infrastructure at all, and you want to get the most power to the most people for the least money, you may end up doing what China did to bring the bulk of its population out of poverty: build a lot of fossil-fuel-powered generating plants.
I'm no systems engineer, but natural gas, which we have so much of in this country we burn it off rather than ship it somewhere, would be an ideal way for people in Africa to get rid of their wood-fired cookery and use LPG stoves instead. LPG tankers and shipping facilities will be needed, but the current U. S. administration did its best to stop such developments, because of the simplistic reason that it involves fossil fuels. I won't go so far as to hang the indoor-air-pollution deaths of millions of people on this decision, but the connection is clear.
I hope Ms. Shapiro sells some vacuum cleaners. But even more, I hope a few million people suffering through smoky suppers get to enjoy the benefits of clean cooking, even if it does contribute to global warming.
Sources: Lisa
Wood Shapiro's article "Your Indoor Air's Dirty Secret is Under Your
Feet" appeared in Wired at https://www.wired.com/story/your-airs-dirty-secret-is-under-your-feet/. The UN Environment Programme has an article
on indoor air pollution I referred to at https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/cooking-smoke-kills-millions-every-year-heres-what-world-can-do-about#:~:text=The%20problem%3A%20much%20of%20this,climate%20change%20and%20biodiversity%20loss.
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