Love eating Pizzas? Whether it’s hanging out with friends or celebrating a birthday, pizza parties are the most celebrated ones. But do you realise that, while we relish the extra cheese pizza, the shops where it is made use charcoal or wood burners that can produce significant emissions and damage the environment in major cities? Well, a new study in Brazil, led by an Indian-origin scientist says this.
The researchers used the city of Sao Paolo in Brazil as a case study. Sao Paolo is a megacity with a compulsory green policy on fuel, yet struggling to meet pollution standards less stringent than Delhi or London.
And what was found by researchers was an emerging risk caused by wood burning stoves in pizza restaurants and charcoal in steakhouses to the environment.
When the findings were clubbed with the geographical attributes of the place, and was read, it was observed that the crosswind caused by the impact of biomass burning of the Amazon rainforest and agricultural areas of Sao Paulo were also found to be a contributory factor to why the city’s air pollution is so toxic, despite a green vehicle policy.
It is to be noted here that Sao Paulo is the only megacity worldwide that uses a much cleaner bio-fuel driven fleet.
Almost 10 per cent of Brazil’s total population lives in Sao Paulo and fill their vehicles with a biofuel comprising of sugarcane ethanol, gasohol (75 percent gasoline and 25 percent ethanol) and soya diesel.
“It became evident from our work that despite there not being the same high level of pollutants from vehicles in the city as other megacities, there had not been much consideration of some of the unaccounted sources of emissions,” said Prashant Kumar, from the University of Surrey in the UK.
“These include wood burning in thousands of pizza shops or domestic waste burning,” said Kumar, who led the study.
One could see people of all ages line up for hours outside pizzerias every Sunday evening. The city is home to around 8,000 pizza parlours that produce close to a million pizzas a day and can seat up to around 600 people a time.
Altogether, 1800 pizzas a day are being made using old-fashioned wood burning stoves, with Sunday being the busiest day of the week.
“There are more than 7.5 hectares of Eucalyptus forest being burned every month by pizzerias and steakhouses. A total of over 307,000 tonnes of wood is burned each year in pizzerias,” said Kumar.
“This is significant enough of a threat to be of real concern to the environment negating the positive effect on the environment that compulsory green biofuel policy has on vehicles,” he said.
Kumar led another research about how Delhi’s landscape, weather, energy consumption culture and growing urban population combined to elevate concentrations of air pollutants, including ultrafine particles, which are the most harmful to human health.
The findings were published in the journal, Atmospheric Environment.
So, next time, when you order a Pizza ask the shopkeeper how they cook it, and what fuel they use.
Let’s do this for ourselves.
The article first published on www.lafdatv.com
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