Post by Farmer Nestor on Oct 26, 2010 16:42:37 GMT -8
By: Kal Stein (President & CEO of Earth Share)
If you’ve been thinking about investing in some new plants and trees for your property, here’s some information that should clinch the decision for you: A new study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, found that vegetation does even more to absorb volatile organic compounds (VOCs) than we thought! Researchers recently determined that deciduous plants – meaning, plants that lose all of their leaves for part of the year – clean more than a third more of these common polluting chemicals from the air than previously predicted.
So where do VOCs come from and why do we want to get rid of them? VOCs are released into the atmosphere from natural and man-made sources including vehicles, forest fires and power plants, and can adversely affect human health and our environment. Scientists are also very interested in something called ‘secondary organic aerosols’ or SOAs, a by-product of certain VOCs, because they are a major cause of disease and death in urban areas. In fact, according to researcher Qi Zhang in a recent Discovery News article, “(SOAs) are more deadly than car accidents.”
These findings have huge implications for mapping and predicting global vegetation and pollution levels, and will allow researchers to better understand how aerosols affect global warming and our health.
The message here: Plant more trees!
If you’ve been thinking about investing in some new plants and trees for your property, here’s some information that should clinch the decision for you: A new study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, found that vegetation does even more to absorb volatile organic compounds (VOCs) than we thought! Researchers recently determined that deciduous plants – meaning, plants that lose all of their leaves for part of the year – clean more than a third more of these common polluting chemicals from the air than previously predicted.
So where do VOCs come from and why do we want to get rid of them? VOCs are released into the atmosphere from natural and man-made sources including vehicles, forest fires and power plants, and can adversely affect human health and our environment. Scientists are also very interested in something called ‘secondary organic aerosols’ or SOAs, a by-product of certain VOCs, because they are a major cause of disease and death in urban areas. In fact, according to researcher Qi Zhang in a recent Discovery News article, “(SOAs) are more deadly than car accidents.”
These findings have huge implications for mapping and predicting global vegetation and pollution levels, and will allow researchers to better understand how aerosols affect global warming and our health.
The message here: Plant more trees!