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In Australia and New Zealand (NZ) domestic wood heater emissions contribute to a substantial community burden of air pollution-related illness and death. Despite increasingly stringent emission standards for wood heaters in Australia, there has been frustratingly little progress in reducing ambient air pollution from this source. In contrast, Environment Canterbury NZ, has made impressive progress driving innovation in wood heater designs to improve air quality. Interventions have included the 2014 introduction of a new performance testing standard, the Canterbury Method One (CM1) that is used to define a class of Ultra Low Emission Burners (ULEBs). CM1 testing is conducted under conditions intended to simulate typical home usage and includes the heater's start-up phase which generates a significant portion of pollutant emissions. It is primarily designed to test the performance of appliances burning softwoods, the main source of fuel in NZ. We aimed to: (1) design a protocol based on the CM1 for testing appliances burning Australian hardwoods, and (2) conduct preliminary evaluations of exiting ULEBs fuelled with hardwoods as a test-of-concept for ULEBs in Australia. The main variation was that we used a single burn phase with double the weight of wood compared with the standard CM1. We tested two certified ULEBs of different designs using our protocol. Emissions from hardwood fuels were higher than for softwoods as anticipated because the appliances we tested had been optimised for softwood combustion. However, the overall performance of both heaters was promising. Our results provide proof-ofconcept that ULEBs could potentially be optimised for hardwoods and have a place in strategies for reducing the harm from air pollution in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this research was to determine the degree of the quality of the performance of the residential environment in preserving human health and its suitability for home quarantine during the pandemic of the emerging Coronavirus (covid-19). The study aim was achieved by choosing a simple random sample consisting of (100 Residential Units) from some Alexandria city districts and some resident families, who were from different economic and social backgrounds. Personal interview was used and the descriptive approach was applied. The most important results were, the degree of the quality performance of the standards of the external residential environment (the health of residential location, the supply of utilities and availability of services), and internal residential environment (Meeting the family’s needs to maintain physical, psychological and social health for its members), and both of them together were medium in the rates of (70%, 69%, 69%) respectively. As for the degree of the suitability for home quarantine in accordance with the conditions of the Egyptian Ministry of Health, it was convenient in less than half of the sample (43%) of the families’ houses, which had a one or more infected members that reached (28%) of the residents sample. Most problems that faced the families during home quarantine that related to external residential environment were unhealthy residential location was (68%), and regarding the internal residential environment, they were the unavailability of a separate room for home quarantine, the unavailability of a separate bathroom and bad air quality at home (71%) for each of them, poor ventilation at home, the sunlight does not enter the quarantine place, continuous water outage (64%) for each of them, and finally the continuous unavailability of antiseptics to clean up the surfaces (61%). The most important recommendations that the research has concluded are, it is necessary to spread awareness among families of the research sample by trying to upgrade the quality of the internal environment performance to preserve the health of its members physically, psychologically and socially, and adapt it to home quarantine. Also, it is recommended to draw the attention of the officials responsible to try to upgrade the quality of the external environment performance by paving the streets and planting trees in them, especially side streets, overcoming the trash problem, improving the utilities and communications network and providing highly efficient health services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In announcing its bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing chose a "Green Olympics" theme to indicate that hosting the Olympic Games would serve as a catalyst for environmental improvements and sustainable development. With the Olympics now just a short time away, it is appropriate to examine the city's cleanup progress to date. This article does so, and also quantifies some of the health benefits of these cleanup activities, placing an economic value on the gains. Results for air pollution cleanup indicate an economic gain of nearly 50 billion yuan over a ten-year period, with a potential annual gain of 3.5 billion yuan for reaching air quality standards. Water pollution results suggest a potential annual gain of another 2.6 billion yuan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Over the next several years, grid-based photochemical models such as the community multiscale air quality (CMAQ) model, the regional modeling system for aerosols and deposition (REMSAD), the comprehensive air quality model with extensions (CAMx), and other regional models will be used by regulatory agencies in the United States for designing emission control strategies to meet and maintain the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for O3, PM2.5, and regional haze. In this study, temporal scale analysis is applied as a technique to evaluate an annual simulation of meteorology, O3, and PM2.5 and its chemical components over the continental US utilizing two modeling systems. The spectral decomposition of total PM2.5 mass from hourly observations and CMAQ and REMSAD model predictions revealed that days of high PM2.5 concentrations are generally characterized by positive forcing from fluctuations having periods equal to or greater than a day (i.e., the diurnal, synoptic, and longer-term components) while the magnitude of intra-day fluctuations showed only small differences between average and episodic conditions. Both modeling systems did not capture most of the variability of the high-frequency, intra-day component for all variables for which hourly measurements were available. Furthermore, it is illustrated that correlations were insignificant on the intra-day time scale for all variables, suggesting that these models in the setup used for this study were not skillful in simulating the higher-frequency variations in meteorological variables and the levels of all pollutants. The models exhibited greatest skills at capturing longer-term (seasonal) fluctuations for temperature, wind speed, O3, sulfate and nitrate. Correlations for total PM2.5, ammonium, elemental carbon (EC), organic carbon (OC) and crustal PM2.5 correlations were highest for the synoptic time scale implying problems with factors other than meteorology, such as emissions or lateral chemical boundary conditions, in capturing the baseline fluctuations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Early studies of plant response to ozone (O3) utilized concentration-based metrics, primarily by summarizing the commonly monitored hourly average data sets. Research with the O3 concentration parameter led to the recognition that both peak concentrations and cumulative effects are important when relating plant response to O3. The US and Canada currently use O3 concentration-based (exposure-based) parameters for ambient air quality standards for protecting vegetation; the European countries use exposure-based critical levels to relate O3 to vegetation response. Because plant response is thought to be more closely related to O3 absorbed into leaf tissue, recent research has been focused on flux-based O3 parameters. Even though flux-based indices may appear to be more biologically relevant than concentration-based indices, there are limitations associated with their use. The current set of flux-based indices assumes that the plant has no defense mechanism to detoxify O3. This is a serious limitation. In this paper, we review the literature on exposure- and flux-based indices for predicting plant response. Both exposure- and flux-based metrics may overestimate plant response. At this time, flux-based models that take into consideration detoxification mechanisms (referred to as effective flux) provide the best approach to relate O3 to plant response. However, because there is considerable uncertainty in quantifying the various defense mechanisms, effective flux at this time is difficult to quantify. Without adequate effective-flux based models, exposure-based O3 metrics appear to be the only practical measure for use in relating ambient air quality standards to vegetation response. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Odor pollution is nowadays recognized as a serious environmental concern. Italy still lacks a national regulation about odors, but several regions issued specific guidelines and regulations regarding odor emissions management, which combine olfactometric measurements with dispersion modeling for assessing odor impacts and verifying compliance with acceptability criteria. However, in cases of variable or diffuse sources, this approach is sometimes hardly applicable, because odor emission rates can hardly be estimated. In such cases, electronic noses, or more generally, Instrumental Odor Monitoring Systems (IOMS), represent a suitable solution for direct odor measurement. Accordingly, IOMS are explicitly mentioned in the most recent regional regulations as advanced tools for odor impact assessment. In Italy, data from instrumental odor monitoring have started to have regulatory value; thus the need arises to have specific quality programs to ensure and verify the reliability of IOMS outcomes. This paper describes the monitoring by a commercial electronic nose (EOS507F) of odors from an area dedicated to tire storage, a diffuse source with variable emissions over time, for which dispersion modeling is not applicable. The paper proposes also a protocol for IOMS performance testing in the field, to provide experimental data to support technical groups working on standardization both on the national and European level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]