Steaming hot temperatures, heart failure, acid rain – these are all gruesome effects of pollution. Over the years, air pollution has been a nationwide issue. According to the World Health Organization, 99% of the global population is exposed to polluted air and in the U.S. alone, 39% of the population lives in places with failing grades for unhealthy levels of air pollution. The major problem with air pollution is that it gradually depletes the earth’s ozone layer, which then not only raises the earth’s temperature but damages ecosystems and food chains in wildlife.
I believe air pollution is a problem that should have more attention centered around it. The best solutions to air pollution would be planting more gardens, using more solar energy panels, and using recyclable products.
Planting more trees and other plants provides many benefits for not only air pollution but also everyday life. Plants consume harmful gases such as carbon dioxide and produce the oxygen we need for our ozone layer. In addition to plants cleaning the air, studies show plants reduce stress and can boost your mood.
Additionally, solar panels not only save energy but are cheaper and an environmentally-friendly way to generate electricity. According to the IPCC, solar panels’ carbon footprint is 12 times less than natural gas and 20 times less than coal.
Lastly, many solutions to environmental issues revolve around air pollution and recycling and recyclable products have been one of the most focused solutions to air pollution and for good reason, as it provides many benefits to the ecosystem and ozone layer. Producing goods from recyclable products instead of organic matter provides many benefits like significantly reducing energy usage. Additionally, recycling reduces the demand for raw materials, which in turn produces less solid waste and preserves the entire environment, both plants or nature and wildlife.
Of course, these solutions aren’t perfect either. Solar panels aren’t advanced enough to consistently be used around the world, some recyclable products aren’t up to par with organic-made products and planting trees and plants requires a level of maintenance that not many have time for. But, if we keep using these harmful methods at the rates we do now, the entire earth will suffer tremendously; wildlife, the ozone layer, ecosystems.
Instead of not using organic matter entirely, we can manage the use of both. We can use collected data such as the earth’s temperature and amount of trees to create a ratio of environmentally-friendly methods to non environmentally-friendly methods. Then, increase and decrease each side of the ratio accordingly and over time, study the effects on the environment and adjust it so we can keep the environment healthy while producing high level materials.
Air pollution is a topic that doesn’t have one direct and easy solution. Many different people have come up with many different solutions to this issue, but what matters is how and when we execute these ideas. If we don’t act on this issue now, it could reach a point in the future where imminent danger is unavoidable, but we have the power and solutions to act now.
Other sources: Climate.gov, NOAA, NOAA, WMO
