Greenhouse gas emissions may be going up but most of us, most of the time, are breathing cleaner air than we did 20 years ago. Why? Because cars are now fitted with catalytic converters to strip out a range of noxious nasties that once created acid smogs in our cities.
But up in the Arctic, they are feeling a nasty blowback from cleaning up our urban air.
Catalytic converters filter our pollutants from exhausts using two metals: palladium and platinum. World demand for both has soared as a result, with catalytic converters taking almost half of current product from mines.
Most of the palladium comes from Siberian mines and is refined at the world’s biggest, and most notoriously polluting, metals smelters at a godforsaken spot called
Norilsk, a closed Russian city on the edge of the Arctic Circle.
The
Norilsk smelters are the biggest concentrated source of sulphur dioxide pollution on the planet.
Sulphur dioxide makes acid rain. And for hundreds of kilometres round Norilsk, the trees of the tundra are dead because of the acid fallout. In effect we are destroying huge areas of Arctic tundra with acid rain, so the rest of the world can keep its city air clean.
The smelters are so spectacularly inefficient that they also release large amounts of palladium up the stacks. One recent study suggests the metals fallout onto the tundra is so great it may soon be worth
mining the soils!
And what about the other metal essential for catalytic converters, platinum? Winning this from the Earth is not so environmentally damaging, but it takes a big toll in human lives.
Three-quarters of the world's platinum is mined in South Africa, where it is now a bigger business than gold mining. South Africa's mines have always been dangerous places. That is partly a result of their often great depth, as I discovered in
a trip down a gold mine there last year.
But the death toll is now turning into a major scandal, as people wake up to the fact that the end of apartheid did little to make the mines safer places to work.
Miners went on strike in December in protest at a
death toll that rose to over 200 last year. And the conglomerate Anglo Platinum recently shut down its biggest platinum mine, the world’s largest, and fired its CEO in an effort to address the problem.
My lungs, and yours, are cleaner and healthier as a result of all this. But I can’t say that it helps me breathe more easily.
Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondentLabels: freds-footprint
Greenhouse gas emissions may be going up but most of us, most of the time, are breathing cleaner air than we did 20 years ago. Why? Because cars are now fitted with catalytic converters to strip out a range of noxious nasties that once created acid smogs in our cities.
......Preventing air pollution will kill us all!