When I read the headline of the article, I was interested to read why would it be the cause of the problem. The article is about why using deodorant is making the air less clear. We all know having deodorant, perfumes, and any other stuff that makes us smell good keeps us from having odor. However, it turns out that it is affecting the air with a harmful type of pollution-at with levels as high as emissions from cars and trucks. Who knew that these type of stuff can cause so much pollution into the air? Researchers discovered that some type of chemical from perfumes, paint, and other products that consumers have can release air pollution to form volatile organic compounds, or V.O.C.s. It releases that as much as motor vehicles do. V.O.C.s can interact with particles in the air make smog, which can cause asthma, and PM2.5, another type of pollution with particles that are connected with heart attacks, lung cancer, and strokes. Smog is associated with cars, but the regulators have forced automakers to invest in technologies that have lessened the emissions of the V.O.C.s from vehicles since the 1970s.

Pesticides and hair products, which are the triggers of the rising share of air pollution, are part of the effect of cars getting cleaner. However, the breathing room has helped scientists see the unseen pollutants that emerge from just a spray of deodorant. Researchers showed that concentrations of petroleum-based compounds have levels that are bigger than anyone can guess from fossil-fuel sources alone, and they just keep getting bigger over time. While people use fuel more than lotions and paints, Dr. Brian C. McDonald, a scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environment Science at the University of Colorado, and his colleagues figured out the difference in how much pollutants from the products end up in the air. Jessica B. Gilman, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that even though drivers consume gallons of gasoline a week, it is kept in a tank, burned for energy usage, and turned into carbon dioxide. The emissions of carbon dioxide are a major part of human-caused climate change, even though they are not V.O.C.s. The researchers found that forty percent of the chemicals that are added to consumer products are released in the air.  There are lots and lots of chemicals in consumer products, but researchers have not located which chemicals are forming into PM2.5 particles. Some of the V.O.C.s that were used in consumer products were stand-ins for chlorofluorocarbons, aka CFCs. In the beginning of the 1980s, those chemicals eliminated because they reduced the Earth’s ozone layer.

When I finshed reading the article, it had me thinking. Have they made a deodorant, perfume, cologne, any other things that can spray not be the cause of air pollution? If they do, do they have it in stores. Since they said these things are one of the causes of air pollution, it is natural that they made consumer products that eco-friendly.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/climate/perfume-pollution-smog.html