A new study has found that 6 in 10 classrooms have worse air quality than busy roads. School is somewhere that every parent should be able to send their children, and feel like they are safe and taken care of. They feel content that they are in a space that is safe, both for their physical health and their mental health. While for the most part, work is being done to make sure that the physical environment is safe for children, studies are being done every day that are showing that more work may need to be done.
According to Study Finds, a new study has shown that 6 in 10 classrooms in the UK have worse air quality than busy roads. This can call for other countries to examine the air quality in their schools to make sure that it is safe for children to breathe in.
Air pollution has already been shown to cause harm for children and adults, but not many would suspect that it would be bad indoors. To complete this study, which can be read in full here, researchers handed out digital pollution monitors to teachers and students who attended 26 different schools.
The most frequent pollutant that they found was classified as ‘volatile organic compounds,’ and this can come from plastics, glues, disinfectants, and solvents. These items are found in almost any classroom, and they can bring some light to the air conditions in other schools.
The monitors also found a large amount of fine dust and suspended aerial liquid droplets. These are commonly brought on by heating, cooking, and transportation. While the researchers looked at schools in large cities and in smaller villages, it did not seem to matter. The air quality was not better, or worse, depending on where the school was located.
What was even more alarming was that some readings from the monitors showed that the limit exceeded the “one-hour exposure threshold” that is set by the World Health Organization. This means that students could potentially be at risk from adverse health events due to them continuously breathing this all in.
Children spend the majority of their waking day in school, and it is imperative that this is a healthy environment for them to be in, it is clear that work needs to be done to make sure the air quality is improved for the students, teachers and staff who spend their days there.
Sources: Study Finds, Environment Journal
