Not treating the air we breathe or the water we drink or fish in as a sewer is a good idea, there is no arguement about that.
However you can actually do something that works, like in my case, fit various meters on the flue gasses on the furnaces.
That made a difference & eventually what we discharged into the atmosphere was cleaner than the air we feed into the burners.
As we burned around 200 gallons of bunker oil a day, that was an excellent idea.
So we were burning a waste product and also cleaning the air at the same time .
Then some pencil dick at the EPA decided that bunker oil was "too dirty" to be burned in the Sydney basin so we converted to natural gas burners.
Because we were burning "clean gas" all of the meters with the exception of the obscuration meters were removed.
Apparently pollution is only pollution is you can see it.
The foundry was around 2 miles from Sydney's Mascot airport.
The air we fed into the burners regularly had better than 3% jet A1 from the take off & landings.
This made profiling the burners a real PIA and regularly was heavy enough to make heavy black smoke.
To compensate for the fuel rich air the burners ran very lean which resulted in a high concentration of nitrates, but that was OK cause you could not see them.
Power stations, ships, trains , aeroplanes , furnaces, heavy trucks & perhaps even metropolitan delivery vehicles, these things make a real difference all the rest is basically bull dust done to make it look like oyxgen thieves are doing their job.
All of the lean burn small engines actually creates a lot more pollution than it restricts if you take embedded pollution in the manufacture & distribution of short life span domestic appliances into account.
But that is way too hard to calculate, much easier to shove a meter up an exhaust pipe, pat yourself on the back and walk away considering the job done.
