Simplest Ways to Prevent Indoor Air Pollution

 Some people are conscious of outdoor air pollution, which urges them to use masks when they go out in the real world. It is good that there is awareness about air pollution. Optimistically, that attention also reaches out to indoor air pollution. Pollutants are not limited to the outside where vehicle fumes and dust and other toxins abound. Pollutants are also present indoor.

Indoor air pollutants are not seen easily but can be smelled sometimes. Indoor air pollution in truth is becoming a worldwide problem. It comes from different kinds of things you have at your home like chemical products used in cleaning or beauty products like hair spray. Indoor air pollutants can also come from paints, pots, carpets, craft and art products, and even pets.

 Ban Cigarette Smoke

Experts say that one of the most common and dangerous indoor air pollutants is cigarette smoke. This is just another reason to give up smoking altogether. First of all, people already know that smoking is harmful to a person’s health and the people inhaling second-hand smoke. But after a person finishes a cigarette, the smoke continues to leave behind pollutants. There are residual tiny gas particles in cigarette smoke, and they can settle in fabrics like curtains and carpets or your couch. It is mostly the children that severely suffer from this because they are usually on the ground, playing on the carpet. Experts call this phenomenon third-hand smoke. The electronic cigarette is also a source of pollution contain heavy metal and VOC linked to a lung problem.

Switch to natural household cleanser

Disinfectants and household cleaners use harsh chemicals in order to be competent. This is why most of the cleaners have the ability to remove stains and dirt in just one wash. But that kind of facility will also cost you good air quality. Household cleaners and disinfectants are among the more common causes of indoor pollution. The fumes from ingredients in these products can irritate your mouth and nose, as well as cause problems for the lungs and heart. Some could also burn the skin.

Don’t use carpet

If it is possible for you, then don’t use carpets. These can look really good at home and will allow you to walk the house barefoot, but pollutants easily stick on to any kind of textile. However, if you have a child and it is necessary to have a carpet to minimize the traumatic effects of stumbling or falls, then you just need to make sure you clean the carpet regularly. The same goes for curtains. Also, wash your bedsheets and curtains regularly—like every week.

 Don’t walk around the home with your shoes on

Make sure you have a shoe stand at the side of your house door so anybody who comes in and can leave their shoes on it. Dirt that comes from outside should not enter your home. We have enough pollutants to battle indoors.

 Minimize air fresheners and scented candles

Air fresheners and scented candles have pollutants. Both of these have chemicals in them to make the house smell better. Air fresheners are known to have formaldehyde and phthalates, which are harmful chemicals for health. Candles are usually paraffin-based and emit toluene and benzene, which are also pollutants and igneous to health.

Conclusion

When people in the same house are getting sick at the same time, this is already an alarming situation that indoor air quality is poor. The environment is currently in a serious situation. It needs protection because we have a wonderful planet. In order to take care of it, we first have to take care of our house.

What Will Happen to Climate if We Stop Emitting Carbon Tomorrow?

 Imagine that today aliens landed and gifted us a carbon-free limitless energy source. And instead of killing each other over this technology, we immediately decided to transform the world into a carbon-free society. 

Electricity, oil refineries, coal and natural gas plants all these wondrous sources would power our homes, industries, cars and planes. So, if we cut down our carbon addiction today, what does that mean for global warming? So, if we stopped burning carbon, would the climate suddenly go back to the calmer, cooler atmosphere where humans lived before the Industrial Revolution? The short answer to this question is: Not exactly. The climate would continue to change and temperatures would remain higher for many ages. So, that’s not good. I know, we’ve been told for years that devastating greenhouse gas pollution is the key to stop climate change. But unfortunately, those solutions wouldn’t immediately stop our planet from warming up. One reason is that over the last 60 years, 80% of the extra global warming has gone into the oceans. It takes time for oceans to heat up, but once you drop adding additional heat, they’d still emit the heat that had previously accumulated. It’s kind of like how a vessel of boiling water continues to give off heat long after you’ve turned off the stove. Because water heats up slowly, it cools off slowly too. And as all this excess heat fully mixes in the deep ocean the oceans would continue to increase, rising sea levels for centuries. The other reason Earth would stay hot is that carbon dioxide molecules -- which cause more than 80% of the warming -- remain in the atmosphere for an unusually long period. If you burn 7 gallons of gas today you create about 140 pounds of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But way off in the year 3000, as much as 50 pounds of that gas will still be floating in the sky, warming up this planet. Since the industrial revolution earth has warmed by about 0.8˚C [1.4˚ Fahrenheit]. Supposed If we turned off greenhouse gas emissions today, shorter-lived greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide would be chemically broken down and dissipate first. That would cause the surroundings to cool by maybe half a degree, over about a century. But carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere way longer because it’s so chemically stable. So that would keep, the earth warmer for at least one and half thousand years. So, many of the impacts we’re experiencing now, like the melting ice, droughts, and extreme thunderstorms would probably also continue. In the end, carbon dioxide might take as long as 10000 years to finally return to pre-industrial levels. So even if we cut down all emissions today, the truth is we are confirmed some amount of climate change and warmer temperatures. But switching to a carbon-free society would still give us a lot of benefits immediately. Health is one of the most important. Over two and half billion people worldwide breathe air that is so polluted that it doesn’t meet World Health Organization guidelines. Air pollution from stoves or fossil fuels is thought to cause more than 4.5 million deaths per year, thanks to things like heart disease, lung cancer and stroke. Most of those deaths occur in developing countries, where there’s more pollution. So awkward fossil fuel burning would immediately improve the lives of millions of people. Wild places would also benefit. Some of the world’s most primeval environments contain abundant fossil fuels. Stopping emissions would mean closure of fossil fuel extraction, which means less construction in wild areas, less noise pollution, and cleaner air and water. Awkward emissions sooner rather than later mean that future generations might still face climate impacts, but they’ll probably be less severe. For example, with each degree of additional global warming, the area burned by wildfire in the western United States should be two folds. Each degree of additional global warming is also thought to reduce crop yields by as much as 15 percent. Lowering emissions means fewer fatalities in extreme weather, hardly any severe storms, and more children manage the hardship of migration to cooler places. And who knows, maybe one of those kids could grow up to establish some technologies to actually absorb the extra carbon straight out of the sky and speed up the cooling. The idea of aliens providing us a magical greener energy source is of course a fantasy. But today we’re already installing real clean energy technologies that could detach us from fossil fuels, things like solar cells and wind turbines. 

The decisions we’re making today will affect not only our future generation but their grandchildren also. Our obsession with carbon has put us and our descendants into a deep hole. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how we will move out, but the good we can do for ourselves and them is to just stop digging.

Lessons Coronavirus has Taught us about Climate Change

Originating from the live animal market in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus has broken out into an international pandemic. Millions of people in China were quarantined and basically closed down its economy. Leaders restricted flights, postponed mortgage payments, and cleared streets with forced lockdowns. Trump banned all travel from different countries. Abrupt and forceful action seems to be following in the footprints of COVID-19, and as someone who comes across most of their time deal with the vision that is climate change. Today, we want to investigate this with a very simple question: what can we learn from the COVID-19 and how can we put this to climate change?  First of all, the Coronavirus (or COVID-19) is a serious international issue. At the time of writing this, the global death toll has hit thousands and will continue to rise.

In this global crisis, the news media has been intensely covering the virus with constant coverage of quarantines and death tolls. Yet in opposition, an environmental issue like air pollution, which has been predicted to cause 5-7 million premature deaths every year hardly makes headlines. So, in the preference of adding to the storm of coronavirus analysis, I want to use the global response to COVID-19 as a device to understand the best way to awaken immediate climate action, if we acknowledge the risk of climate change the way we have to the coronavirus, we would be capably on our approach to a zero-carbon future. Before we can dip into this investigation we must first learn the differences between the two crises. While climate change gradually builds-becoming a catastrophic hazard over the series of decades—Coronavirus is instantaneous and right in our face. As a consequence, climate change research and data are more easily called into doubt, making it much more difficult for international leaders to act confidently and quickly on environmental problems and issues. On the other hand, Coronavirus spreads most quickly and there’s a very clear relationship between effect and cause. We know that tiny virus travels through respiratory droplets made when a person sneezes or coughs. With this information, we are then able to understand a clear boundary between actions and consequences. We know for sure that actions washing your hands frequently and quarantines will directly restrict the spread of the virus. However, Climate change is not so simple. This is due to not only its step-by-step timeline and scale but also to the successful confusion campaigns run by fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil. At first glance, it seems like there is no direct relationship between taking action and seeing change.Climate change certainly is taking lives today, but the link between a particular death and between our emissions is long and complex. Yes, of course, from one example climate change is making certain intense weather events more likely, raising the risk of death either directly from that intense event or indirectly through things that intense event contributes to, but compare that to this statement: Coronavirus has already killed over a thousand lives. That second statement is so much more direct and so is our reaction to it.” In short, there are not only more incentives for those with power to hinder climate action than there are to prevent the coronavirus, but we are also more structurally and psychologically equipped to deal with short-term, clear-and-present dangers like Coronavirus, and less able to deal with multi-decade risky problems like climate change. Despite these differences, and in some ways because of these contrasts, there is a lot to learn from how we’ve responded to COVID-19. One of the big take-away is that there is a very clear relationship between the economy and the emission rates. Carbon Brief asserts that China’s coronavirus lockdown temporarily decreased the country’s CO2 emissions by a quarter, which Stanford Professor Marshall Burke predicts might have possibly reduced the number of premature deaths due to air pollution, so much so that China’s overall mortality rate might have decreased in the months during the height of the coronavirus lockdown. The point here is not that pandemics are good or necessary, it’s instead that there is a large, hidden toll of fossil fuel emissions that is here and now. But to prevent the millions of future deaths caused directly through fossil fuel burning or indirectly through the results of a hotter planet, the world needs to act quickly to create rapid and drastic structural change. The often-quoted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) report asserts that we have until 2030 to make sharp global emission cuts, which many argue is impossible. The Coronavirus definitively shows that large-scale, collective, structural change is feasible in the face of a crisis. And climate change is the biggest crisis of our future generation. As Amy Jaffe, director of the Council on Foreign Relations' Energy Security and Climate Change program, puts it, "Suppose you were a policymaker, and you were thinking about what you would do to lower emissions — you just got a good instruction." Because of the Coronavirus, countries like Italy have almost done away with travel, many previously busy streets are now free of cars and people. Workweeks are shortening for some, others are embracing the potential of remote working instead of traveling long distances, and some companies have staggered work shifts to reduce traffic. In New York City, temporary bike lanes were set up, and walking and biking were encouraged over other transportation options. Of course, the answer to climate change is not to quarantine everyone in their house, that would be a complete disaster. The response to the Coronavirus demonstrates that planned economic lockdowns are not only possible but necessary to cut emissions drastically. But this type of fast structural change shows that without robust social safety nets like a clean jobs guarantee, or a strong low-carbon low-cost public housing system, extensive free public transit, degrowth will harm millions. Climate action propositions like the Green New Deal need to incorporate this type of essential framework in their policymaking because to fight climate change very fast we need a rapid structural transition. A break from the status quo. But what’s key is that this lockdown doesn’t have to mean job loss, worry, and pain, it can instead mean opportunity, free time with family, and a more intentional quality-driven economy. In short, Coronavirus shows us that the rapid emissions reductions called for in the IPCC report are not a line dream, they can and are happening. The virus demonstrates that to collect support for this needed action we need to treat climate change like it really is a global crisis. But it also shows us one more thing: that the needed reduction in emissions through de-growth has to be coupled with strong safety nets like childcare and healthcare for all, to trick all those affected by an economy-wide transition to a fossil-fuel-free world. COVID-19 is scary and is affecting the whole world, but if we don’t act in the same way about climate change, the effects of a hotter harsh planet will be much worse. The Coronavirus response has shown us a straightforward path, we just have the courage to break from the status quo and go down it.

A Brief History about Plastic

 Today, plastics are everywhere. All of this plastic originated from one small object—that isn’t even made from plastic. For hundreds of years, billiard balls were made from ivory from elephant tusks. But when excessive hunting caused elephant populations to decrease within the 19th century, ball makers began to seem for alternatives, offering huge rewards. So in 1863, an American named Wesley Hyatt took up the challenge. Over subsequent five years, he invented a replacement material called celluloid, made up of cellulose, a compound found in wood and straw. Hyatt soon discovered celluloid couldn’t solve the ball problem the material wasn’t heavy enough and didn’t bounce quite right. But it might be tinted and patterned to mimic costlier materials like coral, tortoiseshell, amber, and mother-of-pearl. He had created what became referred to as the primary plastic. The word ‘plastic’ can describe any material made from polymers, which are just large molecules consisting of an equivalent repeating subunit. This includes all human-made plastics, also as many of the materials found in living things. But generally, when people ask about plastics, they’re of synthetic materials. The unifying feature of this synthetic material is that they begin out soft and malleable and may be molded into a specific shape. Despite taking the prize because the first official plastic, celluloid was highly flammable, which made production risky. So inventors began to search for alternatives. In 1907 a chemist combined phenol a waste of coal tar and formaldehyde, creating a hardy new polymer called bakelite. Bakelite was much less flammable than celluloid and therefore the raw materials that were used to make it were more readily available. Bakelite was only the start.

In the 1920s, researchers first commercially developed polystyrene, a spongy plastic utilized in insulation. Soon after came PVC, or vinyl, which was flexible yet hardy. Acrylics created transparent, shatter-proof panels that mimicked glass. And within the 1930s nylon took center stage a polymer designed to mimic silk but with repeatedly its strength. Starting in 1933, polyethylene became one of the foremost versatile plastics, still used today to form everything from grocery bags to shampoo bottles, to bulletproof vests. New manufacturing technologies accompanied this explosion of materials. The invention of a way called injection molding made it possible to insert melted plastics into molds of any shape, where they might rapidly harden. This created possibilities for products in new varieties and shapes— and how to inexpensively and rapidly produce plastics at scale. Scientists hoped this economical new material would make items that when had been unaffordable accessible to more people.

Instead, plastics were pushed into service in the second world war. During the war, plastic production within us quadrupled. Soldiers wore new plastic helmet liners and water-resistant vinyl raincoats. Pilots sat in cockpits made from Plexiglas, a shatterproof plastic, and relied on parachutes made from resilient nylon. Afterward, plastic manufacturing companies that had sprung up during wartime turned their attention to consumer products. Plastics began to exchange other materials like wood, glass, and fabric in furniture, clothing, shoes, televisions, and radios. Versatile plastics opened possibilities for packaging mainly designed to stay food and other products fresh for extended. 

Suddenly, there have been plastic garbage bags, stretchy wrapping, squeezable plastic bottles, takeaway cartons, and plastic containers for fruit, vegetables, and meat within a couple of decades, this multifaceted material became referred to as the “plastics century.” While the plastics century brought convenience and cost-effectiveness, it also created staggering environmental problems. Many plastics are made from nonrenewable resources. And plastic packaging was designed to be single-use, but some plastics take centuries to decompose, creating an enormous buildup of waste. This century we’ll need to concentrate our innovations on addressing those problems by reducing plastic use, developing biodegradable plastics, and finding new ways to recycle existing plastic.

The Environmental Impact of Fast Fashion

 From that dress you have only worn once at a party and shoes you bought for a one-night party fast fashion maybe kind on our wallets but it’s rough and tough on the environment. An ethical fashion influencer Kelly Novell says the toxic chemicals released during the huge production of cheap clothing are polluting our environment. This fashion industry creates 1.2 billion tons of carbon emissions each year worldwide and transportation combined and it's because we need to be more conscious of what and where we are buying from. Now many sustainable brands produce clothes that lessen harm to the planet and people. These brands are eco-friendly. Another way to reduce pressure on the environment is to go to places that recycle our old clothes and send them to be sold abroad. But lots of people still throw their clothes away an estimated one and a half million tons of clothing are bought in the UK each year and nearly a quarter still goes for dumping. We also purchase clothes from charity shops so we cut down carbon emissions and help to save this planet.

The message of this article is to affection the clothes we have got in our closest and don't rush to buy something new.

Environment-Friendly Home Decoration Ideas

 All of us have affection for our homes because this is the place, we spend most of our time. From embellishment to the environment, everything matters for a quiet and fresh feel at home. There is no doubt that we all must decorate our house according to our taste to make it look lovely but what about the atmosphere? How can we make our house atmosphere environment friendly? Let’s go down and examine how can we decorate our home in such a way that impacts well on our surroundings.

 Environmental Friendly Home Decoration Ideas

Here are some eco-friendly ideas we can work on to decorate our home.

1- VOC Emission from Wall Paints

2- Bamboo Flooring

3- In Door Plants

4- Go Organic

1- VOC Emission from Wall Paints

Some of you would not be acquitted of the role of paints in our environment. Everybody wants their room walls to look beautiful with wall paints and graphics no matter what color. So, when it comes to decorating a wall with paint, we’d recommend you to go with paints with either low VOC emission or zero. Less VOC emission means a low percentage of chemical gasses in the room which is more than enough to ask for as an environment-friendly home decoration plan.

2- Bamboo Flooring

How flooring can be environment friendly with regards to your home decoration? indeed depended on natural materials like bamboo or any wooden flooring that is natural by the material. Going with the idea will not only help you in embellishment but will also be favorable for the environment. 

3- In Door Plants

Having plants in your sitting and bedroom is one of the best ideas. These green plants will affect your room’s atmosphere significantly and improve the overall filtration of air within the room. So, we’d recommend all of you to must bring indoor green plants in your room or sitting area to have a good fresh feeling of air in the room.

4- Go Organic

To wrap things up, everything you buy for your home decorations must be made from organic material. Either it's a beautification piece or anything you go with for a home stylistic layout, you would need to sure that it is made from organic natural material which means eco-friendly as well. 

Besides these 4, there are many other things you can do to decorate your home by recycling, reusing and reducing approach.

Conclusion

To wrap things up with this brilliant environment-friendly homed decoration idea, we got to know that we can decorate our home while giving back to nature.  We have to go with these natural ideas to make our homes fresh and free of any pollution. Using these natural items in our decoration ideas would help us a lot in decorating our home in an environment-friendly strategy.

What is Climate Change?

 Now everyone’s talking about climate change. But first of all, what is climate? And why is it changing so fast? Our climate is the earth’s normal weather over a very long time period. It usually takes hundreds, or thousands of years for the climate to change. But recently, our climate has been changing much faster than before. All these changes make life difficult for our fauna, flora, and for people around the globe. And the biggest cause of climate change is human activities Including you and me. When we use fuel, like oil and gasoline, or remove forests to make space for cities or farms, we release greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. These greenhouse gases cause our climate to get warmer day by day. Normally, when the heat from the sun warms our planet, some of the heat reflects back into space. But greenhouse gases act like a big sheet, trapping some extra heat in it. This extra heat can cause all sorts of problems for our planet; and the plants, animals and people who live here. Our glaciers and snow are melting faster. Our oceans are getting higher, and warmer. And our weather is becoming more extreme; with more heatwaves, harsh winters, prolonged summers, heavy rainfalls and strong hurricanes.

 

 Luckily, many countries around the world are working together to fight climate change. And there is a lot of easy steps you and I can take to help too. Like reusing, reducing and recycling things instead of throwing them out; instead of driving, ride your bike or take the bus; use less electricity; and eat homegrown vegetables and fruits if possible. You, I in fact everyone can make a difference at their level to fight climate change for our future generations.