Hello! Welcome back to the last post of this week’s theme on COVID-19 and the environment. In the previous 2 posts, I have brought up various ways in which the pandemic has led to various increases in land pollution as well as decreases in air pollution. In this final post, we will be wrapping up the week with illustrating the abnormalities in the pollution data collected over the pandemic and what that could possibly mean for society moving forward.

Firstly. through observations during the pandemic, it has been found that while there has been a fall in NO2 pollution , there has been an increase in the concentration of O3 pollution (Venter et al., 2020). This is further substantiated by Brancher (2021), who found that NO2 reductions and O3 increases were consistently found over Vienna. Statistically, 82% of the lockdown days in Vienna had lowered NO2 concentrations and 81% of the days had amplified O3 concentrations (Brancher, 2021).

This phenomenon can be explained through figure 1 below, that illustrates ozone and aerosol formation. The green arrows in the figure illustrate primary emissions while the black arrows illustrate secondary emissions.

Figure 1. (Kroll et al., 2020)

According to Kroll et al., (2020), when NO_x levels are high, the system can become saturated, stilling the generation of ozone. The additional NO_x becomes a sink for OH radicals, which slows down the oxidation of volatile organic compounds’ oxidation and thus suppresses ozone production. Furthermore, Kroll et al., (2020) suggests that the NOx can sequester O3 in temporary reservoirs such as NO2 and N2O5. Thus, this illustrates how the lowered NOx emissions may result in higher ozone levels for the environment. This shows how there are multitudes of complexities towards environmental pollution modelling and how the reduction of one particular pollutant may not necessarily be a good thing.

Moving forward, though the pandemic has been a terrible phenomenon for the world, there is an opportunity provided for atmospheric chemists to learn. Bourzac (2020) suggests that many researchers are using the environmental conditions created by the pandemic and the lockdowns to conduct experiments that were only plausible through complex computer modelling before the pandemic. Looking ahead, I hope that the data collected throughout the past two years of the pandemic will allow better policy implementation to reduce our environmental footprint in the coming years. While the pandemic has been awful to say the least, it is most important to relish the opportunities provided for a better and less polluted future.

References

Hello! Welcome back to the 2nd part on covid-19 and the environment! Today’s post will be looking at how there might be an upside to the Covid-19 pandemic in regards to environmental pollution.

During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries across the world went into a state of lockdown, where people were not allowed to leave their homes for activities, with the exception of attaining necessities. This lockdown response had caused a slowdown in the global economy and subsequently, transportation activities (Venter et al., 2020). Venter et al., (2020) further finds a decline in the population-weighted concentration of ground-level nitrogen dioxide during the lockdown dates of 34 countries until 15 may 2020. As such, this suggests that the lockdowns implemented during the pandemic has reduced greenhouse gas emissions emitted during that time period. Furthermore, as industrial areas shut down, it has been observed that there have been decreased levels of criteria pollution such as carbon monoxide, methane, sulphur oxide, black carbon and particulate matter in the atmosphere (Ankit et al., 2021). As such, this further substantiates the idea that the Covid-19 pandemic and the regulations that follow have reduced the air pollution in the atmosphere.

However, lockdowns are clearly unsustainable practices that only provide short-term benefits. The lockdowns had evident economic repercussions of which the marginalised suffered the most from  (Bhattacharya et al., 2021; Sharma and Adhikari, 2020). As such, though the idea of a clear reduction in air pollution is exciting, there is a clear trade-off in this scenario that is unsustainable in the long run.

References

Hello! Welcome to week 11’s theme of the one and only Covid-19! The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly significantly changed the way that many of us have been living and it’s definitely changed our natural environment as well.

Firstly, in a bid to manage the spread of the virus, face masks have been mandated by various states to be worn by their citizens. Right here in Singapore, the state has been mandating the usage of face masks in public spaces since April 2020 (Ang and Phua, 2020). However, these masks are often made up of polypropylene and other forms of plastics or microplastics, adding these materials to the landfill when disposed by their users (Akber et al., 2020). Further studies done by Klemeš et al., (2020) suggests that a mask production consumes about 10-30 Wh energy and produces 59 g of carbon equivalent emissions into the atmosphere. As such, the huge increase in the usage and subsequent demand for face masks have placed a tremendous amount of pressure on the environment via carbon emissions and land waste.

While the collected mask wastes are often brought to the landfill and discarded (Selvaranjan et al., 2021), not all used face masks make it to the incineration plant. For improperly disposed face masks, they may end up in water bodies (Figure 1) where marine animals may get entangled, leading to their deaths . Furthermore, the fragmentation of the macro plastics in the mask could occur due to factors such as weathering, corrosion or aquatic immersion which forms the secondary micro plastics (Yang et al., 2020). When the marine animals ingest these secondary micro plastics, this could cause a bioaccumulation of dioxins within the marine ecosystem as the dioxins are passed through the food chain, causing even more harm to the marine animals and humans that consume these animals for food.

Figure 1.

As such, just the simple mandate of wearing face masks during the pandemic has brought about a significant change in the environment, where carbon emissions from the production of face masks have increased significantly and a new source of microplastics pollution has emerged as well.

References