{"id":56715,"date":"2025-08-10T09:13:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T09:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/56715\/"},"modified":"2025-08-10T09:13:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T09:13:10","slug":"why-you-need-an-outdoor-air-quality-monitor-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/56715\/","title":{"rendered":"Why You Need an Outdoor Air Quality Monitor (2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"

It wasn\u2019t that long ago that few people were monitoring the air\u2014not the government, not its citizens. Today, weather apps provide estimates of outdoor air quality, and the government\u2019s own air quality monitoring website, AirNow<\/a>, has an easy-to-use zip code portal and fire and smoke map<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are real health benefits to owning an air quality monitor<\/a>. Each US state is responsible for developing its own monitoring plan<\/a>. Even in densely populated urban areas, outdoor air monitors owned by federal, state, and local jurisdictions might be geographically spread out, leaving monitoring gaps that don’t accurately capture the air quality beyond one\u2019s front door.<\/p>\n

Photograph: Lisa Wood Shapiro<\/p>\n

Outdoor air quality monitors are not just for understanding the air quality when the odor of smoke fills your home\u2014an outdoor monitor can keep you informed. America has been in the air quality monitoring business for less than a century. In the not-so-distant past, citizens died due to unregulated and unchecked air.<\/p>\n

Once more, Trump\u2019s EPA is seeking to weaken current Air Quality Index<\/a> standards, the numbers that decide what is good, moderate, or unhealthy air, along with repealing the regulations on emissions of greenhouse gases. Those actions will lead to dirtier air and less reliable data. Like face masks<\/a> and air purifiers<\/a>, an outdoor air quality monitor is no longer a niche appliance but an electronic canary in the modern coal mine of a bad-air world.<\/p>\n

\"Purple<\/a><\/p>\n

Photograph: Lisa Wood Shapiro<\/p>\n

Back in January, I woke up to find my PurpleAir Zen outdoor air quality monitor glowing bright red. This happened over several days, and I was confused because the numbers were well over 100 and yet there wasn\u2019t an air quality alert for the area.<\/p>\n

The annual AQI for my neighborhood<\/a> is under 50\u2014considered good air. For context, an AQI of 100 or more is unhealthy for sensitive groups, and an AQI of 150 is unhealthy for everyone. I mentioned the unhealthy air to a friend who reminded me that New York City recently installed a concrete recycling center<\/a> a few blocks from my home. The literal dust-up<\/a> the center caused, including failure to inform the neighborhood about its existence, might be the culprit for the recent uptick in bad air, from the concrete dust<\/a> created by the recycling center. At that point the recycling center had yet to implement irrigation to mitigate the dust plumes. The data from my outdoor monitor fed into PurpleAir\u2019s crowdsourced real-time map<\/a>. On the map, I could see other nearby PurpleAir monitors, and the ones closest to the concrete recycling center tended to have worse air quality.<\/p>\n

Invisible Danger<\/p>\n

In July, after a year of mounting protests and political pressure, the city announced that it would relocate<\/a> the concrete recycling center. What would have happened if residents hadn\u2019t seen the dust clouds or noticed the gray film collecting on their cars? What if they couldn\u2019t see what was all around them? PM 2.5<\/a>\u00a0is the invisible solids and liquids that are in the air. The tiniest form can enter the deepest parts of the lungs, passing into the bloodstream. There, they can cause a host of illnesses<\/a>, respiratory distress, and cardiovascular disease<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

Photograph: Lisa Wood Shapiro<\/p>\n

IQAir<\/p>\n

Outdoor Air Quality Monitor<\/p>\n

In early 2024, the Biden administration strengthened the National Ambient Air Quality Health Standards (NAAQS) for particulate matter, a move that set \u201cthe level of the primary (health-based) annual PM 2.5 standard at 9.0 micrograms per cubic meter (\u00b5g\/m3) to reflect new science on harms caused by particle pollution.\u201d This changed the window of what is considered \u201cgood\u201d air on the Air Quality Index<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Those EPA guidelines are almost double those of the World Health Organization guidelines<\/a>, which are a stricter 5 PM 2.5. Trump\u2019s EPA<\/a> is reconsidering the Biden administration’s PM 2.5 standards. To quote EPA administrator Zeldin, \u201cAll Americans deserve to breathe clean air while pursuing the American dream. Under President Trump, we will ensure air quality standards for particulate matter are protective of human health and the environment while we unleash the Golden Age of American prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Trump administration also wants to repeal greenhouse gas emissions<\/a> regulations. According to a statement from the EPA, \u201cThe EPA is further proposing to make a finding that GHG emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.\u201d Scientific research<\/a> states otherwise. And so, as outdoor air becomes less regulated, it has the potential to get dirtier and make people sick<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Too Close to Home<\/p>\n

This past spring, the smell of campfire filled my home. I peered out my fourth-floor window to see my neighbor\u2019s illegal fire pit three backyards over. I watched the colors on my PurpleAir Zen outdoor monitor change from green to yellow to crimson over the course of an hour. When I logged onto the crowd-sourced PurpleAir real-time map, I could see that my outdoor air quality was an unhealthy 160 PM 2.5 and that a few blocks away, air quality was good at under 30 PM 2.5. There\u2019s nothing surprising about a fire pit generating air pollution, but I didn\u2019t realize how intense and localized that air pollution could be, even though I was four stories up in a half-a-city-block-sized area. This is air quality on a microscale.<\/p>\n

Photograph: Lisa Wood Shapiro<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It wasn\u2019t that long ago that few people were monitoring the air\u2014not the government, not its citizens. Today,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[17641,1336,1397,102,21486,90,56,54,55,1068],"class_list":{"0":"post-56715","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-air-quality","9":"tag-data","10":"tag-environment","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-household","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom","17":"tag-weather"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}