How we can monitor air pollution?

We’ve talked about what air pollution is, where it comes from, and the evidence for and - scale of - its impact on our health. But how do we actually track and measure the quality of the air we’re breathing? Historically this was hard - and expensive - to do, so it was mostly the preserve of governments and health watchdogs. But, with new technology, it’s becoming much easier to keep tabs on air pollution, and in countries where this is a problem, people are now taking matters into their own hands to monitor the air and take steps to protect themselves and their families. One initiative to help people to do this is called “AirGradient”. This is a business set up in Thailand but now acting internationally by financier Achim Haug, who’s the CEO. The low-cost, light-weight monitors are for domestic and outdoor air monitoring. The data are made available to the user both on the device and remotely via a web-page. It’s got the potential to build a huge, global air-quality dataset. And it’s all being done in an open-source way. And what got it started in the first place is an interesting story in itself…

Achim - I'm originally from Germany, but I have been based in Thailand for quite a long time. I went on a sabbatical and I was volunteering at my kid's school. That was in Northern Thailand and they had a ‘burning season.’ In 2019 it hit really really hard and I could see how the whole community was struggling with the air pollution.

Chris - And when you say burning season you literally mean burning?

Achim - Exactly. We are surrounded by wildfires, there's stable burning with rice fields. The air quality is 100 times above the World Health Organization recommended levels. So it's an inferno I would say.

Chris - And that inspired you to think well what can we do about this? How do we improve the lot of people who are living there breathing that in every day?

Achim - Exactly, so we saw the anxiety in the community and we also saw that the head of school didn't know if the classrooms were safe or not. So together with my co-founder we just built air quality monitors as a DIY project basically. We put them into classrooms and made a simple dashboard so that the head of school can just see on his desk which classrooms are safe and which are not.

Chris - And the sensors that you have managed to create, tell us about them. What are they? What do they do? How do they work?

Achim - We measure a couple of different parameters. So for example particulate matter, PM 2.5, CO2, VOCs for those organic compounds, also NOx and temperature humidity. And basically these are all different sensor modules that we combine with a micro control and that sends the data then through Wi-Fi or cellular to a dashboard.

Chris - I have to say, you sent me a couple to try, one that works indoors and one that's built for working outside, and I think I have never in all the years I've been playing with techy things - and I'm a bit geeky like you as well - I've never had a device that was so easy to set up and within minutes it was working the way I wanted it to work and it's worked flawlessly ever since. It got online, it's accessible, I can see the data and it hasn't crashed my computer once. Congratulations.

Achim - Thank you. I think one advantage was actually after we started a year later COVID hit and everything shut down so we had a lot of time to really fine-tune this. Actually the monitor you have is the ninth generation and we only went out to sell it I think after generation six. So, even though it looks simple, there's actually a lot of things that went into it.

Chris - The thing is the company you've set up is doing things slightly unusually because you actually don't take steps to make things hard to copy and to protect. You actually give everything away. What's the business model then?

Achim - It's interesting. Actually somebody once said AirGradient has a counterintuitive business model and I think that really hits it. So all our monitors, everything you can see on our website is open source hardware and that means that you can take the design, build this whole thing, basically clone it completely, sell it and you don't have to give us anything. A lot of people then ask me, ‘hey, how do you actually make money?’ Because we are based in Thailand, we are a for-profit company, we don't get any funding, any grants, anything. We make money by selling the same product that we offer as an open source design.

Chris - So effectively you're your own competitor. So how do you make any money?

Achim - We make money by selling our own products and I think it makes us a lot stronger because by being so open we compete with ourselves basically, so we always have to make sure we innovate. But on the other hand, we also get a lot of contributions. So other people can actually read the source code and we had people from the community helping us find bugs in the source code and to make the product better.

Chris - So, it's really like you give something away and you get something in return? I'm not just saying this because you're sitting here, I am very impressed with the technology and also quite terrified in equal measure because, I put one in my kitchen, I put one in an outbuilding, and the one in the outbuilding is so sensitive, it can see the CO2 plume when my wife starts her car in the morning. I've got an electric car so it doesn't see mine. The one in the kitchen, when the kids put the bacon on, my goodness, the number of particulates and the CO2 level, it climbs through the roof. The number of particulates are scary. We're all breathing that in.

Achim - Yeah, that's correct and I think that's what a lot of people realise once they really measure it, especially indoor air quality. But then this really opens this opportunity to improve it. You could actually just make something with your kid and say, okay, do we do fried eggs or boiled eggs or scrambled eggs and just see the difference in pollution and you will see a big difference.

Chris - Well, your gadget has an array of lights on it as well as a screen, which you can read the figures off the screen, but the array of lights, as soon as I put the frying pan on, it goes all purple. It's kind of saying, get out now, evacuate time level, isn't it? But is this translating into a big help? You set out to help people in Thailand during burning season to improve air quality and reduce exposure for kids. Is it doing what you hoped it would when you set the project up?

Achim - Yes, I think the data is the first step and the data then creates awareness. The things that you realised in your kitchen, I think it's also important to distinguish, if you have a short term spike, it's not as critical as being permanently or over weeks being exposed to very polluted air. This awareness really helps them to take action, basically. You can open the windows in the kitchen. People in Thailand, if it's a more permanent thing, they can get an air purifier, for example, to clean the air more permanently.