When smog has as much deodorant as diesel in it, you know the Earth is in trouble.
A new report, published in Science, shows that urban emissions of personal product volatile organic compounds have increased, just as transportation and power plant emissions have declined. These are the compounds that contribute to regional ozone and particulate aerosols, and combine to form smog.
This means, in cities like Los Angeles, that the amount of volatile chemical products (VCPs) — including personal care products like hair spray, soap, air fresheners, lotions and deodorant, cleaning products, pesticides, coatings, printing inks and adhesives — is now approaching the level of bad effects as those coming from the burning of fossil fuels.
This is important because these personal care VCPs are a lot more effective at producing smog than fossil fuel emissions themselves. So using 20 times as much fossil fuel as these personal chemical products isn't the best comparison. In addition, these chemical products mostly come from processing petroleum anyway.
Unfortunately, existing regulations exempt many of these chemicals from environmental concern.
The researchers noticed that levels of certain volatile organic compounds, like ethanol and acetone, were far too high to be explained by vehicle emissions alone, and began searching for other sources. They found that personal chemical products in the home and at work were contributing a huge amount by leaking out of buildings where they are used, and entering the atmosphere.
Which is really bad because that means that the concentrations inside the home or workplace are almost ten times as high as in the atmosphere, making indoor air quality something we do need to think about.
Sobering news indeed, given that pollution itself kills more people each year than almost everything else combined – smoking, hunger, natural disasters, war, murder, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. In addition to the human tragedy, this pollution costs us well over $4 trillion in annual losses - 6% of global GDP.
It’s not surprising that our personal hygiene would start altering the atmosphere. Since we began walking upright, humans seem to have impacted every place, and every thing, on Earth.
Each time homo sapiens entered a new continent, we hunted all animals larger than us to the edge of extinction, 90% of whom fell over that edge. Humans have extincted more species than any other mechanism, including meteorites and glaciers. We continue to extinct about 30,000 species every year.
Humans now comprise the largest mass of vertebrate matter on the land surface of the entire Earth. The rest is almost all our food and friends, mainly the animals we domesticated over the last 50,000 years, plus a bunch of xenobiotics we’ve transported far from their homes. Only a tiny percentage of all vertebrate mass on land is wild or natural.
During the Reagan Administration, humans passed plate tectonics as the process that moves the most dirt in the world. Humans have dammed a third of the world’s rivers, and have covered, destroyed or altered almost half of the world’s land surface. And we still cut down 50 million acres of forest every year.
Humans use up most of the globe’s fresh water faster than it can be replenished. We use about 3 quadrillion gallons of fresh water per year, about equal to the annual flow of the ten biggest rivers in the world. Most of this water is used to grow food and animals, but it does take 2,600 gallons to make a pair of jeans.
We have a name for this time period since humanity began impacting the planet - we call it the Anthropocene epoch.
So as we try to reign in burning fossil fuels, we need to look around and see what’s taking their place in our lungs. We certainly could use less deodorant, scented lotions and air freshener.
Humans don't stink that bad.
