Clean Air Superhero

We’re back to our favourite topic this week: children! It’s a long and winding road to get air quality improvements around schools, as we’ve experienced now with two different primaries in Lambeth. So sometimes the kids have to take it into their own hands!

Here are our daughter’s Clean Air Day pledges such as not using a car (“that I don’t have”) and a superhero called Airy who will suck up fumes and pick up rubbish. It’s great the school are doing this (we think it’s partly to progress with this Transport for London accreditation). But we did spot other pledges focused on carbon footprint, which of course relates to air quality, but in itself isn’t pollution. We ask: better that they engage children with the subject or should the pedagogic input be a bit more precise?

Louise met the Chief Scientist of Department of Energy Security and Net Zero last week, who told her about some videos she had created during lockdown about air pollution, aimed at schools and children. All still very relevant! We’ll have the chance to discuss all this with Ciara Alleyne, new local councillor for the school, and Deputy Leader of Lambeth covering environmental issues, in a couple of weeks’ time.

We take the opportunity for air pollution awareness wherever we go! (Poor daughter!) Recently we found ourselves in Peckham Rye Station where one of the Awair monitors is. This project is initiated by friend of this blog, Andy Grieve. We’ve been remarking recently how we’ve used local pollution data from next to the school and yet we have no idea where the actual physical monitor is! So this is a great way of bringing the data to life, and in a very congested area of London.

And now for the fun part! We’ve been building a Tamagotchi with our daughter which shows a happy through to sick dog, depending on the local air pollution levels. We have the possibility to get a small grant from Breathe London and we wondered: should we use it to create a second one which can be loaned out to families, say for a month at a time. Families could use it on the school run, or even contribute to programming it. Please comment or message us if you think this would be popular!