A website designed to help people understand the levels of pollution around the country was launched this week.
Pollution.mt compares government air quality data with health guidelines to provide hourly pollution assessments for five localities and one mobile station.
“The goal isn’t profit, it’s to educate people and raise awareness of the issues,” said the site’s creator, Daniel Vella.
The 28-year-old software developer was inspired to start the project while commuting to Valletta by bicycle a few years ago.
“The air felt so heavy, I was interested to find out more about Malta’s air quality... I found out that the government had publicly available data, but it was overwhelming to try to understand it,” he said.
The project remained on hold while Vella completed his master’s degree alongside his activities as former president of bicycle advocacy group Rota, before kicking into action a few months ago.
The site provides hourly assessments for Attard, Għarb, St Paul’s Bay, Msida, Żejtun and a mobile station that travels around the country, using data from monitoring stations operated by the Environment and Resources Authority (ERA) in those localities.
By comparing vehicle and shipping emissions, construction activities and windblown dust with guidelines from the World Health Organisation (WHO), Vella’s site aims to present easy-to-understand summaries of pollution levels around the country, rating them as fair, moderate, poor or very poor.
The site had already attracted thousands of visitors, Vella said, and urged anyone interested in contributing to the project to get in touch.
In time, he hopes to scale up the site by adding new features but would also like to see the government invest in more monitoring stations.
A different perspective
According to lead researcher at the University of Malta’s Department of Chemistry Noel Aquilina, however, it is also important to compare pollutant levels to those specified in the European Commission’s (EC) Ambient Air Quality Directive.
“You cannot say air quality is bad by comparing hourly concentrations to a daily or annual limit and say that air quality is bad if it exceeds that value. The only important numbers are of the EC Air Quality Directive,” he said.
“The WHO are air quality guidelines and not legally binding to any government in the EU. Air quality generally is evaluated as a whole with a specific index that needs to be calculated, not using specific regulated pollutants,” said Aquilina.
In response, Vella said that while the WHO guidelines are not legally binding, they are stricter than those issued by the EU.
“The Air Quality Index of ERA works in the same way but instead of comparing to WHO guidelines it compares the individual pollutant to the EU guidelines, which is also a valid approach,” he said.
“It is important to note that WHO guidelines are stricter than EU guidelines. Throughout the development of the site, I toyed with the idea of evaluating the air quality status against EU guidelines, rather than WHO guidelines, but I wanted to offer the public something new.”
In November, a Eurobarometer survey found that more than two-thirds of people in Malta believe the country’s air quality has deteriorated in the past 10 years and the majority are afraid their health is suffering more as a result of the pollution.
Sixty-seven per cent of locals said they believe the quality of Malta’s air had worsened in the past decade, the highest rate in Europe alongside Cyprus.