Indoor smog - February 16, 2012

More of the same, with sun. I walked Anya in the park at Daniel's school, and again at home. It really is odd, it feels like mid-March, not like mid-February. I expect budding out will be early this year. Anya has so many interesting things to smell in the dirt and piles of dead leaves, she really doesn't want to come back inside when we're done walking.

I spent most of the day at my desk, and sometime around 3, I smelled a whiff of what I at first thought was spray-on adhesive. It kept getting stronger (oddly, I couldn't smell it elsewhere in the office). I checked upstairs, and then I went downstairs, and found some folks spray-painting, at least 50-60 feet away in the big open space under our office. Why it was only really leaking up into my space I don't know, but they opened windows and I put the fan on and opened windows and the chemical dispersed.

So much of our attention on air pollution comes from outdoor sources. As I noted a few days ago, it's really the indoor pollution that has ended up killing more people—and even more so, the direct sucking of tobacco smoke into the lungs. When toxins are in the air and that air can't disperse, that's when things get deadly.

And yet, when air quality is bad, people are "advised to stay indoors." Why is that? Perhaps the ways outdoor air enters most houses, filters out larger particulate. But that wouldn't affect ozone, or CO, or other gaseous pollutants. Maybe its just so less exercise will put less stress on the lungs.

How much indoor air pollution is particulate (smoke) and how much is gaseous (chemicals)? This article ties mostly particulate pollution to COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder), and a variety of other lung health issues. Radon is a known gas pollutant, so are VOCs from drying paint (is that what I smell from the spraypaint downstairs?). There's a decent summary here, which does focus less on particulate pollution.

One of the things The Big Smoke noted was that once the smoky coal-burning was largely eliminated in London, then people began to experience photochemical smog, like ones found in Los Angeles. By blocking sunlight, the cloud of smoke had prevented the sunlight-activated "chemical reaction of sunlight, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, which leaves airborne particles and ground-level ozone." That's what wikipedia says about photochemical smog, anyway.

What I'm wondering is, once we got rid of all the smoky fireplaces and ashtrays and obvious particulate pollution sources that used to fill most indoor spaces, were we still essentially setting ourselves up for trouble? Is there the indoor equivalent of photochemical smog?