MEPS WEAKEN AIR QUALITY DIRECTIVE

IS THIS CHILD IN DANGER?

NO HOPE IN SITE FOR RUGBY RESIDENTS AS AIR QUALITY SET TO GET WORSE IN EUROPE: MORE SHORT TERM EXCEEDENCES PERMITTED

Rugby residents learned today that they can now officially be more polluted, more often, as the MEPs gave way to the pressure exerted by lobbyists working for polluting industries, and RELAXED controls on short term pollution incidents which are of GRAVE concern to Rugby residents who know of the HEALTH DAMAGE the exposure to short term high levels of PARTICULATE can cause.

350,000 premature deaths occur in Europe every year due to PARTICULATES (PM10) emitted from polluting industries, road traffic, and other smaller sources. The Directive would streamline existing air quality legislation and set new controls on particulates.

BUT MEPs (no doubt being lobbied by the thousands of paid professional industrial lobbyists) voted to DELAY compliance with existing limits for air pollutants by up to four years beyond the 2010 deadline, plus an extra two years on top of this for PM10 and Pm2.5, under certain conditions.

They also voted to weaken the daily limit on concentrations of PM10 by increasing the number of exceedences from 35 to 55 days per year. (This is much worse for people living round polluting industrial sites such as in New Bilton and in Rugby town where the cement plant's low level sources give out an estimated 100 TONNES a year of particulate - and no one knows anything about the particle size and speciation of particles!!) MEPS also voted to make the new limit on PM2.5 proposed for 2010 NON-BINDING until 2015.

Some requirements were supposedly strengthened, but with a "sting in the tail."
PM 10 annual limit to be reduced from 40 micrograms/m3 to 33 micrograms/m3 - BUT with 55 exceedences.

The COMMISSION called the changes UNACCEPTABLE and would expose people to EXCESSIVE and AVOIDABLE levels of pollution.

The EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENTAL BUREAU said that the changes had WEAKENED the DIRECTIVE. "There is a clear risk that polluters will simply do nothing if they are given these elastic deadlines. The apparent strengthening of these limits is largely cosmetic."