Distinguished Research Chair Professor Peter Brimblecombe is currently teaching at the Department of Marine Environment and Engineering at National Sun Yat-sen University. He received his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and has been living and working abroad ever since he left his native Australia for his studies. His most recent research interests lie in air pollution and microplastics and the related social movements and policy-making and the relation between art and air pollution.

 

 

-       KAROLINA KULIS: What was your motivation to continue your career at NSYSU?

 

 - PROFESSOR PETER BRIMBLECOMBE: I first came in 2006 and then had a long collaboration with Professor Chon-Lin Lee of the Department of Marine Environment & Engineering. We both developed an interest in marine pollution by plastics, which is a big topic at the moment, so it was a great opportunity to come here and research that. Another motivation was to come and teach marine atmospheric chemistry, as no similar course has been taught at the College of Marine Sciences for more than a decade. I'm also supervising some PhD students.

 

-       K.K.: You worked in quite a few countries.

 

 - PROF. P.B.: My first appointment was in Fiji, where I had one-year teaching at the University of the South Pacific. Then I went to the United Kingdom for 40 years and worked at the University of East Anglia, a school which really influenced environmental science. When I reached 65, I felt it was time to retire because when you're in a university for 40 years, everybody knows you, the chancellor knows you, every time there's a problem, it's all “Peter, you know, wouldn't you like to be the acting director…” and you can't say “no, actually I wouldn't”. I remember once telling him, “Look, when I grow up, I want to be a scientist. I don't want to be a director”. I felt leaving and going to Hong Kong would be wonderful as I knew Hong Kong very well; City University at the time was not really a top university, but I thought it was very ambitious and sure to succeed.

 

 -       K.K.: How is the NSYSU environment different than the universities you studied and worked at? 

 

 - PROF. P.B.: What I have always liked about this university is the ability to be quietly by yourself and work. I really like the fact my office here is so quiet. I only have one or two visitors a day, whereas in most other universities there are administrators pouring into my office all the time. Unlike all the universities I'd had an appointment at, NSYSU is the one where I get a chance to contemplate things most. I also like the students here. Their English is not as good as in Hong Kong or Fiji or UK, but it's really nice to see them struggling so much and successfully engaging with the materials.

  

 -       K.K.: What is your mission as a teacher?

  

- PROF. P.B.: At the heart of what I want to teach is understanding that chemistry is vital for making policy, regulatory and social decisions. If you don't understand the underlying science, you are at risk of making the wrong decision. I always want to see marine atmospheric chemistry linked to our policy about the atmosphere. For instance, the policy relating to emissions from ships - there's been enormous pressure to control the emissions from ships because they burn the cheapest fuel and end up being very polluting. Also, I want to make sure that the students realize that even the most specialist topics, like marine chemistry, have so many ramifications in our cultural and historical environment. For example, during the early 1950s, Western military researchers developed equipment that could detect ionized traces of the diesel pollutants to search for submarines as the aircraft flew around over the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean.

  

-       K.K.: What projects and research fields are you concentrating on right now?

  

- PROF. P.B.: We are particularly interested in very small pieces of plastic. Bigger things like running shoes that float in the ocean often break up into microplastics, which can be eaten by plankton. Also, on the surface of the plastics, you get metals and organic material accumulating. We are going to look at what happens in fish stomachs and see how microplastics dissolve, to understand how the fish acquire toxic materials. Additionally , there is a project on air pollution I’m doing with NSYSU Aerosol Science Research Center and collaborating with Universiti Putra Malaysia. When children are picked up from school, the parents come along in the cars with the engines left running while the child comes along and boards, which causes a significant peak of pollution, as we have measured in Banhgi, Malaysia. Recently, we've lent some monitors to Kaohsiung Girls' Senior High School and the teachers are going monitor the situation there. I've also have a project examining how air pollution affects horse races. Horse racing is really big in Hong Kong; there is lots of money involved. Air pollution is affecting horses differentially. Imagine that a very good horse is very susceptible so a less good horse might win because it's not affected by air pollution.

  

-       K.K.: Do you think we should say no to plastics or are we doomed to keep on using them because it is the byproduct of the petrol industry on which we depend right now?

  

- PROF. P.B.: Okay, let's get rid of plastic bags, they are a big problem. We get rid of plastic bags and go for paper bags as we think that's a more natural material. But it's already evident that the ocean is full of fibers from paper, though it's probably from toilet tissue, which ultimately ends up in the ocean. It is biodegradable, but it takes a huge amount of time; it's probably shorter than plastics, but we probably use more paper than we use plastic. I don't think there's a justification saying that plastic is a waste product from the petroleum industry. You probably can't get rid of plastic, so we need to dispose of it more carefully or limit its use. In some countries, plastic bags have declined because people have to pay for them so the whole idea of carrying your own shopping bag is really much more dominant. One of the huge problems is drink bottles. A millions are used each minute yet only a tiny amount gets ever recycled.

  

-       K.K.: Does aluminum have a smaller carbon footprint than plastic?

 

- PROF. P.B.: At least in theory, aluminum is very economical to recycle, just as glass. Both glass and aluminum are easy to recycle, however, the energy savings in glass are quite small. Recycling old glass requires only 10% less energy than making a new piece of glass, while in the case of aluminum the savings are around 87%. We need to reduce the usage of plastic and we need other materials to be recycled too.

  

-       K.K.: The yearly average PM 2.5 pollution in Kaohsiung has dropped from a yearly average of 30.7 as of 2013 to 22.7 in 2019, which is a good improvement but how has the composition of the pollutants changed through this time?

  

- PROF. P.B.: It looks good because you're changing the level of the concentration of the pollution, but over time it's very reasonable to ask, what components are changing? Kaohsiung is a marine port and an industrial city with large numbers of motor bicycles, which engines can be very polluting. Obviously, there's plenty of monitoring data but I don't think detailed changes that take place in Kaohsiung is something really well known. The improvements are good and it's not a climate like in Beijing where you have a long winter heating period, which leads to enormous pollutant accumulation in stable air.

  

-       K.K.: We might not need heating in Kaohsiung, but we use quite a lot of air conditioning.

  

- PROF. P.B.: Yes, but mostly air condition using electricity, so the energy consumption takes place at the power station, which can be quite well regulated, and you can make sure that you minimize the emissions. Heating is often done in a very local way. Each building might have its furnace and trying to regulate one million furnaces in a large city is a lot more difficult than regulating two large power stations. This is also why cars are so difficult. It's easier to regulate a large industry, which also has the technical skill, while the average person owning a little car or a truck doesn't have the skills to reduce the emissions.

 

 -       K.K.: What about electric vehicles then?

  

- PROF. P.B.: I'm not against electric vehicles, but they still emit pollutants. The moving parts and brakes release metal particles into the atmosphere, the tires release fine particles of rubber, so you don't eliminate all the pollution from the vehicle itself, but you do eliminate that combustion source. It seems to me that places like Hong Kong have had it right. In Hong Kong, there are only 70 cars per thousand people and there is a fantastic public transport system. The danger of going the electric route is that we ultimately avoid the notion of public transport as a kind of service. USA is the classic case of an entire nation that simply cannot face the notion that you might have publicly owned transport rather than private transport. The solution is not going into electricity, but concentrating on mass transportation, because cars, even electric, are a huge waste of resources. Kaohsiung does have a very nice, but sadly underused public transit system.

  

-       K.K.: People should stop complaining that they are in traffic because THEY are the traffic, and start using public transport.

 

- PROF. P.B.: People believe someone else pollutes. You have to say: “I am the polluter”. We like to dissociate our own emissions to thoseof others. But I'm not without hope. I think the world is changing and that people are becoming more and more nervous about that, but it's a slow and painful process, which is why in my courses I'm always so interested in social change and regulation. It’s deeply connected with pollution.

 

-       K.K.: In your resume, you wrote: “there are limits to how far and how rapidly air pollution concentrations can be reduced, especially in densely populated cities”. What are these limits?

 

- PROF. P.B.: There's a whole raft of reasons. Regulators have traditionally taken the view that regulation involves stopping emissions. They say, if we eliminate half the cars on the road, we cut the emissions in half. But that's not sensible, because there'll be some other ways in which people will find to move about. How do you replace one form of pollution with another and is it actually worse? There were some terrible mistakes in history. Refrigeration in the 1930s was driven because refrigerators were leaking poisonous ammonia. Thomas Midgley invented then chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), another refrigerant, which nearly destroyed our ozone layer. He also invented leaded petrol. Poor guy. Thank goodness he died young because for every problem be solved, he created an even bigger problem. The other constraint is that sensible approaches to air pollution don't involve one government department. In most countries, air pollution is the realm of the Ministry of Environment, but we spend 90 percent of our times indoors, so it actually should be the Ministry of Housing that's really responsible for this. You might say, it's all about transport. It's the Ministry of Transport that really ought to be grappling with this. But it falls usually to the Ministry of Environment, which has no control over the Ministry of Transport. So what you have is a piecemeal solution. We have got to have deeply interconnected agencies working together in parallel. Another constraint is you can't reduce things very quickly. The legislative process is very slow and you have to do the research beforehand. And then if you make mistakes like Thomas Midgley…that's some of the reasons why change is necessarily slower than we like it to be. 

 

 -       K.K.: About 50 percent of the air pollution in Kaohsiung comes from the heavy industry around the city. Why can't we just reduce the impact of that at the source by installing PM 2.5 filters over the chimneys of these factories?

 

- PROF. P.B.: This is this is the kind of error that administrators get into. We go from emissions to pollution to exposure to health outcomes. What politicians frequently do is to believe that halving the emission will halve the negative health outcomes. But it's not like that. So let's pretend you've got a huge industrial area with lots of pollution, nobody lives there. It's just a bunch of factories and about 20 workers. Most people are housed somewhere else being exposed to automobile traffic. So reducing the industrial emissions will not affect most of those people's lives. You've got to think about what is the exposure experienced by most people? I'm totally in favor of actually stopping the particulates being emitted from factories, but if we cut all the industrial emissions by half, we won't have necessarily halve the concentration or  halve people's exposure. So it's the linearity – that's the question. Of course, industries need to control the particulates emissions, but we shouldn't overestimate the improvement that will result. That's why I teach my students to think beyond simple actions and to really understand how science affects policy.

 

-       K.K.: In the past month the air quality in China has greatly improved due to the COVID-19 epidemic. For how long do you think this positive side effect is going to last?

 

- PROF. P.B.: It's related to the well-known effect called “holiday effect”, when people go on holidays then factories shut down. When the APEC meeting or the Olympic Games took place in Beijing, the factories were shut. I believe it’s a disastrous policy because people are given illusion that you're actually changing air pollution, but it’s only for the short term. You can invent terms like “APEC blue” and say, isn't it wonderful? But actually, citizens are more thoughtful than that. I'm particularly interested in how air pollution improvements are seen by social media here you find citizens saying, “why can't we have these changes for longer?”. It’s those social changes I think are going to be big from the virus and its effect on air pollution.

 

-       K.K.: I read your recent research “Urban park layout and exposure to traffic-derived air pollutants” and I think it's very interesting because we used to think that parks are the lungs of the city, but actually trees don't make a major contribution to the city's air quality, don't absorb pollutants effectively and may even lead to locally increased pollutant concentrations.

 

- PROF. P.B.: We have for centuries believed that parks are the lungs of the city but it's the park that's the lung of the city and not the tree. What the park allows is to distance yourself from the noise and the pollution of the vehicles. So it's about the distance: the clean space is inside the core of the park. Trees locate people, they don't absorb the pollutants, but block them. If you imagine you've got a big tree, if all the pollutants went inside the tree and mix round, and they don’t, they might get absorbed. There's a wonderful calculation, if you removed all the trees from Beijing, you'd have 15% less pollution because the trees are blocking all this pollution and traffic in the city. But I don’t think chopping down every tree is a good idea! 

 

-       K.K.: Then what can absorb the polluting particles?

 

- PROF. P.B.: It has seemed a crazy idea to me to release pollutants into the atmosphere and hope to catch them later on. In some places, for instance, in an enclosed bus station, you might gain something by coating the interior walls of the bus station with absorbing tiles. But in the first place, don’t emit the pollutants! Once they are released, it’s really hard to recapture them. Except in very limited cases, absorbers are not an effective way to deal with air pollution. Clearly, trees can absorb carbon dioxide on a planetary scale over periods of months but the air in cities is only there for an hour, 30 minutes, 10 minutes. 

 

-       K.K.: That’s shocking.

 

- PROF. P.B.: It's hard to change strong social movements. In the 90s museums were been spending lots of money to install very expensive air conditioning systems to filter out dust. What I found was that the particles on the paintings were actually fibers from people's clothes. The particles had nothing to do with the air conditioning system. It took 20 years, until about 2015 to overcome that long-held belief that an air conditioning system with a good filter will clean the air in a gallery. It’s really hard to change social myths, particularly where there are vested interests, like large companies selling air conditioning systems.

 

-       K.K: Finally the PM 2.5 have to settle on the ground. What happens when the particulates reach the ground and the waters?

 

- PROF. P.B.: The deposition of gases and particles is very widely spread, in Europe of the 1980s and caused the acid rain problem particularly after sulfur dioxide was concerted to sulfuric acid. Why did acid rain affect fish so badly? It got diluted in the atmosphere and deposited in low concentrations on the snow, on the outer surfaces of the snowflakes. Then the snow is slightly blackened by the particles and absorbs heat and radiation from the sun, so in spring it melts quickly. The acis in on outer edges of the snowflakes and it  melted first, so the very first melt of spring led to a huge burst of acid, just at the time when young fish were hatching, so they were killed. This complicated process amplifies the impact of these winter deposits. Some particles are very toxic, like industrial particles in fireworks. However,  the fireworks industry is in trouble: China has really been able to cut back on the use of fireworks dramatically to reduce accidents and air pollutiob. You can see declining utilization of fireworks and pressure from the government; the trade war with Donald Trump caused fireworks exports to USA decline. Large fireworks factories have closed because there's so little demand for fireworksm but smaller ones have begun to open and these have much poorer environmental and safety regulations, so the number of explosions now in Chinese these factories has increased.

 

-       K.K: Kaohsiung is a port city and is affected by marine air pollution. Why is it important to reduce marine air pollution? And how is its impact different than air pollution generated by land-based sources? 

 

- PROF. P.B.: Marine diesel fuels contain quite a lot more toxins than normal diesel, with very high concentrations of vanadium, nickel and sulfur. Many countries now try to control the sulfur content as it causes the acid rain problem. When the ships operate mid-ocean, they're creating aerosols that can effectively change the reflectivity and the radiative budget over the sea. Much of the emission takes place outside any national jurisdiction, so control tends to fall to the countries that register the ships. Consequently, the big difficulty is that most ships are registered in small countries such as the Marshall Islands, Liberia and a few other countries with almost no regulations, so the ships can burn whatever they like. 

 

-       K.K: What about the benefits of shore-side electricity?

 

- PROF. P.B.: Totally in favor. I think the real problem is its pricing – it's got to be provided cheaply. It definitely reduces the marine air pollution and air pollution from ships drifting only in a local environment.

 

-       K.K: What about nuclear-powered ships? Are you in favor of this solution?

 

- PROF. P.B.: I don't really see a great deal of enthusiasm at the moment outside the military uses because they have to be very strictly controlled. The military can do that, whereas normal commercial vessels find it more difficult. I think it would be much more imaginative if we returned to wind-driven ships: they worked perfectly for centuries, and were very effective by the 1800s; though erratic, clippers were really fast. 

 

 -       K.K: Could you tell us more about the book you are writing, The Art of Air Pollution?

 

- PROF. P.B.: The book is about how painters have represented a revolution and what we learn from paintings about air pollution. I'm really interested in Chinese painting and the way that it uses the atmospheric perspective, the mists to create a sense of distance. My students had a fun exercise last week during my class on marine air pollution, looking at paintings of clouds and trying to work out which were correct. I'm interested also in why painters choose to paint air pollution in given manners. There was a worry in the 1800s that the air pollution was so bad in cities that urban paintings would no longer be done. but it was actually the reverse. Painters such Monet chose to go to London because the air was so strange and polluted that it created a sense of abstraction. And one of my theories is that abstract art owes its origin to air pollution. 

 

-       K.K: Good luck with the book and thank you for the interview.