what determines air quality? and how do you improve it?
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Air quality is determined by several factors. If we’re talking about ambient air quality (ie outdoors) the criteria pollutants are ozone, sulphur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, and particulate matter 2.5 microns or smaller. These all contribute to smog and have impacts on human health. There is also impacts from volatile organic compounds, like benzene. Improvements are made by eliminating the sources of these compounds. For SO2 and NOx that’s reducing emissions from vehicles and industrial processes. Petroleum refineries for an industrial example will use a flare during process upsets to avoid larger issue at the facility. However this means they release a lot of SO2 and VOCs. Scrubbers and other pollution reducing measures can be used to limit how much SO2 gets release, as does removing the sulphur compounds in the feed stock. PM2.5 and Ozone are generally the result of atmospheric reactions between those other compounds and aren’t primary pollutants (ie released from a point source) so reducing those other compounds helps reduce them too.
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