Bad Air Day? Low-Cost Pollution Detectors to Tackle Air Quality

A new generation of pollution monitors developed by the University of Cambridge, together with academic and industrial partners, could help gather the evidence essential to tackle poor air quality.

Air pollution is the world’s largest single environmental health risk, causing one in every eight deaths according to figures released in 2014 by the World Health Organization. The new sensors are small enough to carry, stable enough to be installed as static detectors long-term around a city, and sensitive enough to detect small changes in air quality on a street-by-street basis.