How Is Air Pollution Affecting Your Health? | Ever Wondered

[Music] [Music] 100% fresh 100% clean tear cleaners our

ear really or more importantly what science doing to maintain or improve it hi I'm John watt and this week I'm taking you behind the scenes to look at

what Kiwi scientists are doing to take

away pollution leads into Auckland waterfront somewhere down there to find out about air pollution from the people

who study it liebherr the national institute of water and atmospheric research on the edge of Auckland's viaduct Neera currently gathering data to give us a clearer picture of our urban air quality and an eight-year research

program called healthy urban atmospheres or who are leading who are two scientists of the guy Coulson and dr. Enloe scientists rarely gets eight years to

work on one problem the project is looking at air quality in all sorts of forms it's looking at what is the hazard to our health presented by air quality to what degree are New Zealand's is

exposed to that hazard and also how can we design our cities so we don't have an air quality problem in the future New Zealand being an island in the middle of the ocean we aren't surrounded

by neighbors who are polluting so we have a situation where any pollution you find in New Zealand is our own fault so the advantage of being on an island is

that it makes it much easier for us as scientists to isolate the individual pollution sources that we're interested in it's only really in the last decade

we've really gone out they we've put monitoring stations in place in the major cities in New Zealand we found out that our air quality isn't like a lot of our south island towns as many people know our polluted by wood smoke in the

winter in Auckland and to some degree in Wellington we have a lot of traffic and a traffic just keeps on growing and growing and growing so what are the more dangerous air pollutants the World

Health Organization has come up with a list of the most harmful to human health no one is the dirty five carbon monoxide an odorless gas that reduces the oxygen

carrying capacity of the blood and can affect sensitive organs like the brain in the heart nitrogen dioxide it appears to have an inflammatory effect on the lungs and can

be especially harmful to young children as Mattox from Qaeda sufferers and the elderly sulphur dioxide a potent respiratory irritant levels keep rising due to the increased number of diesel

vehicles on our roads ozone and the stratosphere is a useful blocker of UV radiation but at ground level it's an air pollutant and it impacts on the respiratory tract

particulates tiny airborne particles that come from both natural and man-made sources like car emissions wood burning

and aerosol leaves project aims to find out just how much of these dirty five we take in every day most people assume that in one area people get exposed to

similar levels of pollution but that's not always the case the conventional expectation is that there isn't a great deal of difference between one person's air quality and

their neighbours air quality they both live in the same part of town you'd expect that they're exposed to the same kind of pollution generally what we found though is that the differences in exposure between one person their

neighbor can be enormous one of the most important factors is the way they move around the city the whole assumption that your air quality is to do where you're live with assumes when you stay

at home all day but you don't you travel it's only recently that many measuring instruments have been small enough that you could carry them on

person now we don't spend all our time stood next to an outdoor air quality monitoring station so it's important to follow a person through their day to understand how they are exposed to

different levels of pollution in the different places they go with new portable instruments they could finally take scientists out of the lab and onto the city streets they put three

scientists simultaneously on three very different modes of travel by bicycle by

bus and by train I got the bicycle it must be the healthy option but do the other two know something that I don't

[Applause] we're all heading out at the same time drink pee cows we're setting in the mornings so we're traveling the same route so we can actually compare how

much pollution you're being exposed to when you're taking different commuting months [Applause] so what we have is we have a CPC it's a three SS seven the condensation

particular counter every second it just counts the number of particles we have a Grimm which in that actually gives a way to measurement of particulates this is a cue track here which will give a co and

co2 we also have an affront AR Langan which is electrochemical cell and that will actually give a co reading and we have a GPS and also a camera on here and

so if there is a bump in the data maybe that we've gone for a plume of air which is actually showing up on our data we can actually figure back and we can look at the moment in time where we were

and when it occurred in terms of carbon dioxide it's not very polluting the trains because it's a it runs away from

the track but there's a lot of stuff pollutant happening especially if you're close to the carriage and there's the diesel emissions directed at you so you

get a lot of particulate pollution from there and in terms of health as a main as one of the main causes of respiratory diseases during this kind of test I find

myself really aware of the fumes that I'm breathing in but with the density of Auckland's traffic sometimes the air pollution is the least of a cyclist problems so John this is the trace of

your journey today so all those Peaks are you going through the plume of a car as you ride by it this could be a bus the bus a car something like that

once we've looked at the photographs and followed the GPS track yeah we'll be able to follow your journey and say that spikes that bus these big spikes could be intersections mmm yeah because the

intersections tend to be the most polluted areas on a road what we found when we really started looking at this traveling data we found

that the highest exposures were in the car higher than being on a bike on the same Road so the cyclist is right behind a huge dirty buskers a big cloud of diesel

smoke and what happens is you have in a second and winds blown it away if you're behind that same dirty bus in a car but dirty air gets in through the vents and it's trapped and takes several minutes

for that air to escape and recirculate from the car air pollution has initially that affects all of us but there's still so much we don't know yet about what air pollutants are doing inside our bodies

especially their fix that particulates are having on our bodies and our cellular levels let's meet Joe Cavanaugh from land care Canterbury's one of only a handful of scientists internationally working on

the biological responses associated with particulate emissions my research is unique in New Zealand there's there's basically only us I'm doing it which is quite cool we're interested in what's relevant so particle composition and

particle size to the effects that is being observed particulates are particles in the air so small that they can't be seen with the naked eye however

when inhaled they can attack the body at a cellular level they are often lumped into one category pm10 which refers to particulates of 10 microns or smaller

what Joe is doing is examining where the changes and particulate sizes have different health effects on human cells equality tends to be regulated on a size

and mass basis and the implications of this are is you just regulate things on a mass basis you may be missing what's actually important in terms of the

biological effects this beast here is a size fractionation cascade sampler one of only teen in the world it basically sorts out and filters the

different airborne particulate according to their size it enables us to give better characterization of the particles and therefore what components contribute

most to the toxicity but it's not just the particulates that are dangerous other harmful compounds can piggyback onto the particles making them even more

toxic when inhaled polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs that Joe is testing their mutagenic which means they can

cause cells in your body to mutate and become cancerous in New Zealand the PAH concentrations are very high especially in wood burning cities

this makes Joe's research crucial and finding out how they affect their health the ones that you're looking at around you mutagenicity it's a key one that's the first first step in getting cancer

forming basically the response that we're measuring here is how much mutation of that cell line you know occurs and that's what results in the

color change we've done some work on ambient air sampling in Christchurch in Auckland and what we found is that even though Auckland has got lower particulate concentrations than in

Christchurch some of the inflammatory responses in particular relatively speaking a lot higher it's still too early for Joe to draw conclusive results but what does she expect to uncover

about the health effects associated with the different particulate sizes it all sees more of the cancer types of responses and different types of inflammatory responses we'll see with

those smaller size fractions so Joe's research is well underway - showing us the effect that air pollutants have on our bodies and helping us to understand the very real dangers of particulate

pollutants but what do we have to fight against their pollution let's meet a scientist who's working to further our knowledge of the oldest and best snow

and cleaner of the air the tree now why do you study trees why our tree is important to us they have all these wonderful properties in that you know they'd taken carbon dioxide from the air put it oxygen which

we breathe regulating water in the environment but also they're able to take quite a lot of pollutants like some of the car exhaust gases out of the atmosphere and they absorb them the main

interest at the moment is in their ability to what's called sequester carbon it's what whole Kyoto Protocol is about after all people want to know well

how much carbon the trees absorb 30 percent of a tree's carbon and that's where were calm darkside goes I would also has got oxygen hydrogen nitrogen in

it but large part of it is carbon what happens is we cut pieces off it and then analyze the carbon that's actually in here actually measure it look at its age and see from the tree rings here there we go

work out how much carbon per year a tree accumulates what's unique about your research now I think we're one of the few places in the world and being able

to analyze whole trees we are really fortunate we were given 20 we actually put them through a commercial chipper

and you end up with material like this and then we've got to put them the album to drive them to get them down to a standardized weight then we've got to reduce it down to the fine powder so put it from its grinder which is essentially

like a great powerful home food processor so I can introduce you to look at who ran you through how we actually do the final steps and find out how much

carbon was actually in the wood the material is combusted the organic material is released as a gas SS you to

this you do gas is then moved on through a detector it's based on infrared so based on the amount of sample plus the

signal I get from the detector the carbon concentration can be estimated in New Zealand at lease it's probably the first piece of work but it's looking at the native trees I think

this is one of those you know a few examples were actually going to get full analysis of native tree carbon content right so what does that mean for us what

does that mean for New Zealand the Kyoto Protocol that Lee was negotiated was originally just based on pine plantations and the amount of carbon dioxide that pine would take out of the

atmosphere compared to how much we emit over alpha Kyoto allowance native systems weren't included and native forests cover millions of hectares of a country many times more than pine

plantations the important thing about native trees is that they're there for thousand years maybe in the case of a calorie if we just relied on pine

plantations they're logged every 25 35 years whereas what we're talking about with native forests is a long term taking carbon out of the atmosphere

trees are a fantastic resource for cleaning up our air but we still need to directly address the air pollution that we're creating products still exist that

purify vehicle emissions by removing toxic gases these are really expensive and not very efficient what if we could develop a system that increase their efficiency removing toxic gases while

minimizing the cost to the user let me introduce you to a Kiwi scientist who's helping to develop just such a system if you've watched this program before then you already know my name is John watt

I've recently completed my PhD at nanotechnology at Victoria University in Wellington nanotechnology is the study of the very very very tiny a nanoparticle is fifty to a hundred thousand times smaller than the width of

a human here that's like comparing a basketball to the diameter of the earth and when you get down to this tiny length scale we see a whole lot of unique and unexpected properties so you can think of it like if you had a lump

of sugar and you put that in your coffee it take a long time to dissolve but if you mesh that up into a powder form you get a very very large surface area and that dissolution happens a lot faster so

the same kind of thing happens on the nanoscale where you get a very very large increase in surface area and the surface becomes very important in determining the properties of the

system my research into nanotechnology has helped enhance the properties of palladium a real metal used in catalytic converters which are responsible for removing toxic gases from vehicle

exhausts here's how it works toxic gas from the engine enters the catalytic converter the guest lands on the Palladium where it undergoes a

chemical reaction to turn it into something more environmentally friendly there's a lot of different sources of pollution but this is one of the biggest the personal car let's have a closer

look to see what's coming out of the back of it now we've got the probe in the exhaust we come to the computer here and it shows up the usual suspects and our vehicle emissions carbon dioxide

hydrocarbons nitrous oxides carbon monoxide well that was a modern car not so bad quite a bit of carbon dioxide but only a small amount of carbon monoxide and

trace elements and nitrous oxides so let's have a look at an older car which is a much more common sight on New Zealand streets the one we looked at before was modern and had a catalytic

converter this one doesn't so let's see what their missions are like now without a catalytic converter as expected their missions are far greater that with the modern car we've got an increase in carbon monoxide and

we've got an increase in unburned hydrocarbons the Palladium and catalytic converters does do its job but there's two problems it can get easily blocked

up and palladium costs a small fortune almost twenty thousand New Zealand dollars per kilo so what we're looking to do is use palladium on the nanoscale

which will increase their activity of the catalyst while minimizing the amount of metal used so that reduces the cost so how do we make these palladium

nanoparticles time to Don the lab coat and get the chemistry flowing so I guess one of the main things in growing palladium nanoparticles is you need a palladium source and our palladium

sources are plated in salt but to make palladium metal we need to reduce the salt into a metallic form now to the Palladium salt we're going to add what's called us effect and so this is like a

soap molecule and this is what we use to control the growth of the nanoparticle so without this effect it would just get a large crystal of palladium the last thing to check in is a solvent so this

is the solution that the reaction takes place in we then use what's called a Fisher Porter bottle to do our reaction and using this we can put any type of

guest we want in there at any type of pressure now I need to feel the pressure reaction Basin with hydrogen gas which

X's our induction it's time to stick it at the oven at about eighty degrees and that's going to kick off the reaction it's a tricky reaction to control so let's hope the conditions are just right

to give us the results we expect this is what palladium looks like up close as it grows into a nanoparticle this effect as we add force the nano particles to

branch out in all directions leading to a complex shape so now we've grown our nanoparticles we need to make sure that

we've got the size in the shape that we want but we can't just look at them because nanoparticles are so tiny and they're much much smaller than the wavelength of visible light so that's about five millimeter across and when

that solvent dries there's going to be up to a trillion nano particles on that copper grid what we need to use is this piece here this is the electron microscope sponsored by the McDermott

Institute and worth 1.2 million dollars so this gives us really really high definition structural information about the nano crystal the whole electron microscope is under a super high vacuum

and this is because we're using an electron set image if there's any dust particles or air molecules in there the electrons will scatter off there and we won't be able to get a picture to make sure we've got a complete vacuum and we

need to add liquid nitrogen and this creates what's called a cold trip [Music] now we can look at an electron micrograph of what we've made because we're using electrons to image we can

get right down into the structure of the nano crystal so each one of these spheres here represents an atom and we can see that it's all arranged in a uniform structure to give us our

palladium crystal these are palladium nanoparticles as we expect them to grow so these are those symmetrical spherical or qubit like shapes but these aren't that interesting for catalysis because

they've got a very low surface area but what we've been able to make that is high surface area CH and like particles it means there's a very very large surface area for those toxic gases to

land on and undergo the chemical reaction so this means that you get a much higher activity but you can use a much smaller amount of metal so it

reduces cost there's over 700 million cars in the world and each one of these can produce up to 300 kilograms and toxic gases every year so there's a lot of potential for this technology to

purify those emissions and make cleaner air for everyone that's all the time we've got to explore in this show we'll see you again next time

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