Urban Pollution: Causes and Solutions

Authors Avatar

Causes of urban pollution

Cars:

One of the main causes of urban pollution is the increasing number of cars and other vehicles on the road. Exhaust emissions from these vehicles result in the production of the main green house gases carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate emissions. This not only damages the urban environment by polluting the air but is possibly a cause of respiratory diseases. 

Traffic congestion causes high levels of carbon emissions

Solutions:

There are a number of ways of limiting the number of vehicles and amount of emissions in urban areas. Encouraging public transport such as trams and tubes significantly reduces the number of vehicles on the road and so reduces congestion as well as pollution. The lower the congestion is in an urban area the lower the exhaust emissions are as much fuel is used up when stuck in slow moving traffic jams. Further ways to cut down on the number of vehicles on the road is to introduce something like the coloured number plate system used in Mexico City. These colour coded number plates prevent cars from going out on certain days of the week. Another way is to encourage cycling by setting up integrated cycle paths throughout an urban area so everything is easily accessible by bike. Also setting up bike racks outside places such as shopping centers and bus stations as well as allowing bikes to be carried on buses for free could also help to encourage commuters to travel by bike and not car. These measures have been introduced in Glasgow and have proved to be very successful.

Join now!

To encourage people to use more environmentally friendly cars taxes may be reduced on cars such as electrically powered ones or even increase the taxes of less environmentally friendly ones. However this option would e extremely unpopular. 

Factories

Factories cause numerous problems such as atmospheric pollution due to high sulphur dioxide and other green house gas emissions. They can cause health problems in urban areas as pollutants and other by-products are released into water supplies. Many factories produce toxic waste products which aren’t properly disposed of.

Solutions

By using cleaner, renewable fuels to run factories you can ...

This is a preview of the whole essay