School 'Air Quality Pledge' - Clean Air Day 17th June
The Public Protection Partnership are asking school head teachers across the area to sign up their school to an ‘Air Quality Pledge’ to raise awareness and help keep our air clean ahead of Clean Air Day on 17th June. The ‘pledge’ to improve air quality will encourage the children within the school to educate their parents, carers, guardians, family, teachers, and baby sitters to change their habits. This is part of our continuing work with local schools to improve air quality and encourage behavioural change, a key element of the £259K funding from the DEFRA Air Quality grant programme PPP were awarded earlier this year.
During the Pandemic PPP saw the lowest levels recorded of Nitrogen Dioxide. To support in keeping harmful air pollutants low PPP are raising awareness ahead of Clean Air Day encouraging people to use their vehicles less. This can be done by reducing the number of times you use the car to go shopping, or to work and encouraging residents to walk or cycle to school or work. We can continue to learn from the air quality results during the pandemic and keep our air clean.
Air Quality is not just about cutting the emissions on the “school run”, it’s about ensuring that we cut them everywhere to keep Berkshires air clean for everyone. Every time you use your vehicle be aware of when you might have you engine needlessly idling.
PPP measure air quality across the area using diffusion tubes in set locations, which measure nitrogen dioxide coming from vehicle exhausts. The tubes are mainly attached on or very near to residential properties so we can assess the pollution levels where people live and work. We swap the tubes over every 4 weeks and the ‘exposed’ tubes are sent for analysis. This gives us monthly readings that go towards providing an annual average level.
We also have four automatic continuous monitoring units in the following locations:
- Peach Street, Wokingham
- Twyford Crossroads
- A339/A343 ‘Burger King’ roundabout, Newbury
- Bracknell Fire Station
The continuous monitoring units measure the nitrogen dioxide levels to provide readings for a one-hour period and annual average exposures. In addition, the Bracknell unit measures the daily and annual average Particulate Matter (PM10) levels, which is another pollutant of concern.
