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In the early days of me visiting Manila I suddenly realized that every time I was in town for 3 to 5 days I ended up with a terrible throat infection. In the last 50 years of my life I had to take very seldom any serious medicine and I have not been in the hospital for the last 30 years, but those were the days of me having to get some heavy antibiotics. I put it down to the air pollution. Now it does not happen any more, but I think it is due to my body having adopted rather than a massive reduction in pollution. But what are the long term impact of bad air quality? How can we measure it and how can we eliminate it? One thing that struck me as well is realizing that Filipinos have in average lower life expectancy than the rest of Asean. Simply google and the surprising data is easily available. Is that only down to an unhealthy diet – I think air pollution plays a role as well which should warrant more attention. Many questions and I do not think that I can provide answers to all of those, but I did some experimentation and actually learned some useful things. Once I became a dad 15th months ago I got obsessed with finding ways to ensure that I do the best for my baby daughter – relatives have been briefed that they are not supposed to feed my daughter with sugar loden stuff, nor are they supposed to buy anything that has a solvent smell, whether shoes, toys, pens or anything else under the sun. And some of our neighbors had to listen to my message about how bad it is to do open burning. Actually it is not allowed by law, but the reality on the ground in the Philppines is that outside of Metro Manila the problem is rampant. How can you enforce it when it is still considered a normal practise. The first thing I did was to buy an indoor air quality monitoring tool. I looked around and found out that a device developed by a Filipino is actually the most comprehensive indoor air quality monitoring tool. That blew me away and even more crazy is the fact that he has mainly customers from Europe. Or maybe it should be less surprising considering the environmental and preventative health awareness locally is limited. And boy have I been active with using my device. It is called Uhoo (Uhooair.com)- I deploy it at home and sometimes while I travel. Here are two screenshots – Nr 1 is from a fancy restaurant at Greenbelt Manila – I pity that staff that is working there. Myself and my friends left after 1 hour but staff will be exposed to high VOC (volatile organic carbon) constantly. Nr 2 is from a time where we had open burning in the Neighbourhood – high pm 2.5 levels on red alert. I had to show the neighbours the picture as they claimed they have always done open burning and it is not dangerous. So my question to you is – are Filipinos killing themselves without bothering or knowing!? Who actually cares anyway? Or should I ask you all to make yourself knowledgeable and to insist that existing laws get enforced to eliminate open burning and smoke belching vehicles with toxic emissions. In any case, it might take a long time till that happens. But what I can recommend you is 2 types of actions: 1)Start being aware, check the existing air quality monitoring data which is made available by the government and take measures into your own hand by monitoring your indoor air quality. 2)Eliminate anything in your household that could bring in such toxic pollution. When you buy things do the smell test. If your shoes, toys, markers, glue or paint contains solvents, then maybe you want to consider to alternatives that do not have solvents and that will be more healthy for you and the planet. The alternatives exist, but very few people buy them at this stage. Its time to take action for the sake of our health and the health of the planet. If you have a question or a suggestion to make, just find GreenMan Matthias Gelber on facebook and drop me a message. I will respond!
