It has been known for many years that cooking indoors can pollute the air in your home and cause health problems, especially if you cook without proper ventilation.
But new research has found that exhaust fumes from cooking can also worsen outdoor air quality.
“If you can smell it, there's a good chance it's affecting air quality,” researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Institute of Chemical Sciences recently said. I wrote about a new study investigating the causes of air pollution in urban areas.
Researchers quantified compounds emitted when cooking food (a type of volatile organic compound (VOC)) along a busy restaurant-filled street in Las Vegas, comparing the amount emitted by gasoline-powered cars. They found similar high concentrations.
According to NOAA's report, researchers found that “on average 21% of the total mass of anthropogenic VOCs present in Las Vegas' outdoor air was due to cooking activities.”
“Twenty percent comes from cooking, which is about the same as the tailpipe emissions we've seen,” said Matthew Coggon, a research chemist at NOAA and the study's lead author. Ta. “Basically, cooking produces as many volatile organic compounds as exhaust pipe emissions.”
These compounds are important because they are known to react with nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere to form smog and reduce air quality, he said. The study, published last month in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, said researchers focused on data from Las Vegas but also included tests in Los Angeles and Boulder, Colorado.
“We are measuring half of the 'recipe' for smog formation,” Cogon said. “That's the important part.”
As cars have gotten cleaner in recent decades, Cogon and his team are working to track down other contributors to air quality degradation, ultimately linked to cooking emissions. .
“You can choose [the aroma] You can stand up and see, 'Oh, this is a grill that's cooking,'” Cogon said. “But we haven't been able to really quantify the volatile organic compounds that come out of it.”
Until now, yes. The study found that emissions from cooking around crowded restaurant areas were comparable to levels found in laboratory cooking studies. And Kogon said he expects similar rates of reactive compounds to be present in Angelenos' air, extrapolating from a more limited data set collected in Los Angeles.
But Professor Cogon said there was a big caveat to this research, noting how much of the reaction these compounds needed to form ozone and particulate matter, which can have very negative effects on human health. Researchers still don't know how often this happens.
Nevertheless, he said, it's a safe assumption because researchers know these compounds are highly reactive. “So if something is very reactive, we would expect it to be an ozone precursor.”
Cogon said research is underway to fully understand the effects of these compounds.
But each step is important to help better account for the impact of cooking emissions on the atmosphere so that air quality regulators and policymakers have the most accurate picture of what causes air pollution, he said. Ta.
Currently, “models are significantly underestimating the amount of cooking in the atmosphere,” he says. “We can now make more informed decisions.”