Early morning in central London. As queues of traffic slowly snake their way through the busy British capital, Romain Lacombe is getting to work.
The founder and CEO of Paris-based startup, Plume Labs is using Flow, a wearable air quality tracker that monitors outdoor and indoor pollution.
The small metallic device tracks everything from particulate matter and exhaust fumes, to dangerous household chemicals and gases.
That information alone is useful, but the companion smartphone app goes one step further by syncing with other Flow users to provide an up-to-date crowd-sourced map of air pollution.
The map shows high areas of air pollution in red and lower areas in yellow and white.
Lacombe says this crowd-sourced information is not only useful for city residents, but also policy makers as they plan to tackle air pollution.
“By crowd-sourcing the level of pollution across town, we’ll be able to build a map of the areas where you can go in real time to escape pollution,” explains Lacombe.
“And hopefully that’s going to be useful not only for people who live in cities and who want to know how they can reduce their own exposure, improve their health and well-being, but also for policy makers, for mayors of cities.”
Plume Labs has also created an Air Quality Report smartphone app that provides air quality level forecasts throughout the day.
The idea is users can plan their day – such as going for a run in the park – around peaks and troughs in pollution.
“We feel that the moment is right to build somehow the people’s environmental protection agency,” says Lacombe.
“We’re putting this device in the hands of people so we can all know our own personal exposure, but also so we can help each crowd-sourcing and mapping air quality around us to make our streets, make our cities eventually cleaner and healthier for everyone.”
Not far across central London, startup Airlabs is demonstrating this Clean Air Bench.
It might not look like much, but this smart piece of urban furniture is creating a clean air bubble around it.
Air is drawn in through the back; its technology traps particles in a filtration system before gas pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, are absorbed by specialized media.
Clean air is dispensed from under the armrests and several other grills. The bench is fitted with five air-cleaning units in total.
This bench was created to showcase the technology. The idea is the units can be fitted to everything from benches, to lampposts, bus shelters and city walls.
Initial independent testing by London’s King’s College in July 2016 found an Airlabs test unit removed more than 87 percent of nitrogen oxides.
Airlabs CEO Sophie Power claims they’ve since been able to improve on that to remove over 95 percent of nitrogen dioxide that passes through it.
“People can change their habits in certain ways, but there are unavoidable places, people need to get the bus to go to work, to take their children to school, to go on the transport system,” she says.
“The ideal fact would be if everyone stopped using diesel and we didn’t pollute in the first place. That’s not going to happen today, so let’s try and protect the people while we can, while we are moving in the longer term to reduce these pollutants.”
Airlabs technology is also used in industrial settings, such as cleaning heavily polluted air from factories.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), an estimated 12.6 million people died as a result of living or working in an unhealthy environment in 2012 – that’s almost one in four of total global deaths.
Last month, London mayor, Sadiq Khan issued a ‘very high’ air pollution alert for the first time, as cold, windless weather allowed emissions across the whole of southeast England to build up.
The London air monitoring team at King’s College London said pollution in the capital was at ‘black,’ the highest level, meaning people should reduce physical exertion outdoors.
Experts at King’s College said the rise in pollution was caused by a combination of traffic pollution and wood burning.
“Well put simply, road traffic is the biggest problem and diesel is worst of all,” says Oliver Hayes, an air pollution campaigner at Friends of the Earth.
“We have too many cars, too many vans and lorries all running on dirty diesel engines – not all running, but too many running on dirty diesel engines. There are lots of causes of air pollution, but in cities and in London in particular road traffic is the biggest problem.”
