New Method to Track Pollution from Cooking

Beijing: Researchers have found that black carbon is a good tracer to separate cooking organic aerosol from traffic-related pollution, paving the way for a new method to track pollution from cooking. Cooking organic aerosol is one of the most important primary sources of pollution in urban environments.

By applying the black carbon tracer method to several datasets in megacities of Beijing and Nanjing, the researchers found that cooking organic aerosol contributed 15-27 percent to total organic aerosol in summer.

The findings suggest that air quality improvements in developing countries could benefit substantially from the reduction of cooking emissions. There is growing evidence that exposure to cooking oil fumes is linked to lung cancer, the study said. A new method to separate cooking organic aerosol from traffic-related pollution is needed as it is often challenging to separate cooking organic aerosol from traffic-related organic aerosol due to the similarity of their unit mass resolution spectra. (IANS)

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