Last week I had the chance of getting Foobot an indoor AQI device with PM, VOCs, CO2, Temperature and Humidity Sensors.

I have been using it since Thursday 19/11/2015, it has been great so far with many useful informations about my air quality. Firstly the device is placed in my living room and I have noticed that my lowest background levels are:

Living room lowest readings

• CO2 = 450ppm
• VOCs = 127ppb
• PMs = 0μg/m³
• RH = 60%

PMs can change rapidly when my living room stays uncleaned for 3-4 days, especially when I move a lot around (which I do) and reach values of 17μg/m³. VOCs don’t change a lot because in general I don’t use toxic products for cleaning. CO2 from the other hand can get worse when I have the living room 15m² closed for more than 2-3h and two people are inside. CO2 can reach values of 3000ppm although CO2 isn’t a threat for humans but can indicate your over all well been. Humidity is high and sometimes can reach values of 73% and for me it is hard to battle.

All these data are still under observations and more are about to come.

 

The answer is almost every time the same, Education. People don’t understand the importance of the air because simple they don’t know that exists, ignorance or non-awareness and because their eyes can’t see it yet. Schools don’t educate kids and if they do always on a basic level, mostly about water and trash.

The other day I was reading a shocking online article, it was about the people from China that they don’t seem to believe that they have air quality issues in multiply levels in their country. Those kind of articles make me wonder and make me feel scared about the future. Why the Chinese don’t understand the problem, maybe they do but they ignore it because they worry they will lose their jobs which is a possibility if you think that they are +1,401,586,609 people and all these people need to work so they can feed their families. However this problem doesn’t appear only in China, even here in Spain people are ignorance about air contamination.

Then there are the smokers, people that are willing to spend money on smoke but literally on smoke CO2 plus other gasses  just because they feel good and cool for a moment. Lack of education? Maybe yes, but also because I think we don’t evolve mentally. Of course we innovate and discover new things but our ego doesn’t allow us to see beyond ourselves and our image.

Finally we have some “great” governments that are unable to control or most of the times have a say over big companies. And why those companies don’t care? Money and greediness. Some of them even use the word “Green” to attract more clients or make their clients feel better when they buy their products.

From my point of view money and fines won’t save the world and even worse it can’t undo all the damage that they have done and they are still doing because all of those cars that are still working and emitting NOx.

Up to 40 times higher NO_x output in real-world driving. An estimated eleven million cars worldwide, produced between model years 2009 and 2015.

To find out if your vehicle is affected and has a motor EA189 you should consider:

– Using a motor 1.6 TDI with a power between 75 and 105 CV or a 2.0 TDI between 84 and 180 CV

Those are the following 43 models:

– Audi: A1, A3, A4 (family B8), A5, A6, Q3, Q5, TT

– Seat: Alhambra, Exeo, Ibiza, León, Toledo, Altea y Altea XL

– Skoda: Fabia, Octavia, Superb, Rapid, Rapid Spaceback, Yeti, Scout, Roomster

– Volkswagen: Golf, Golf Cabrio, Polo, Touran, Passat, Caddy, Scirocco, Passat CC/CC, Eos, Tiguan, Jetta, Multivan/Transporter/Caravelle/California (all from generation T5), Sharan, Amarok, Beetle, Crafter.

So my big questions are: Can we trust big corporations and governments? Do they really care about us?