Do you leave your car engine running when you do the afternoon school pick up?
In an effort to cut air pollution around schools, there is a call for parents to turn off their cars in pick-up zones in an attempt to improve air quality around the school and its students.
Peter Rayner, director of the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub, is leading the campaign following a submission on the discussion paper which demonstrated the impact of adverse air quality on children.
“Firstly we looked at the overseas experience of it, and there’s a fair bit of action happening around the world to reduce the idling of cars,” he said.
“Secondly we looked at some new data on what happens to kids’ lungs, and they seem to be particularly sensitive to adverse air quality.”
Professor Rayner explained that those effects seemed to stay with the child long after the exposure.
“It appears that children suffer from long-term lung development effects from being exposed to adverse air quality.”
And he said he believed there was a fairly simple solution to improving air quality around schools.
“When you put those two things together and ask what can we easily control to improve the quality of life for those kids, it looked as if doing something about parents idling in their cars, and idling of cars and buses around schools in general, was a pretty easy thing to do.”
Professor Rayner said the idling of cars and buses was of particular concern given the proximity of the height of a young child and the exhaust.
