Air Quality

The EIA Air Quality Working Group comprises members from a diverse group of specialist technology and consultancy companies. The aim of the working group is to encourage cooperation between these sectors in order to solve the challenges posed by air pollution.

These include monitoring and modelling in order to better understand the sources of air pollution and how they develop and transport through the atmosphere.

Alternative fuels play an important role in reducing pollutant emissions and innovative combustion technologies can also lead to cleaner emissions. Abatement systems such as catalytic converters and particulate traps can reduce tailpipe emissions and new materials address non-combustion emissions such as tyre and brake wear. Sound and pollution control barriers can also improve environments nearby transport and industrial hubs.

Indoor air quality is also within our remit which means we have active members in local exhaust and ventilation, building management systems and filtration technologies as well as IAQ monitoring technologies.  We also embrace the social sciences, with members involved in educational programs, behaviour change studies and those delivering ways of democratising the availability of air quality information. Below is an outline of some of the issues which this working Group discusses.

Air Quality (Outdoor)

  • Monitoring of outdoor air quality
  • Atmospheric modelling
  • Improving emissions inventories
  • Supporting national and local air quality management strategies
  • Promoting technologies and policy to mitigate emissions
  • Reviewing, challenging and shaping government policy
  • Development of Air Quality standards

Air Quality (Indoor)

  • Building design
  • Local exhaust and ventilation(LEV)
  • Indoor air quality monitoring
  • Sick Building Syndrome Studies (SBS)
  • Outdoor / Indoor pollution dynamics
  • Mitigation measures

Chair of the EIA Air Quality Working Group

Jim Mills - Managing Director, Scotswold Ltd

Jim Mills has over 40 years experience in the field of environmental monitoring. He was a founder and director of a number of UK companies (EMC Group, Air Monitors Ltd, Monitor Europe Ltd, Environlogger Ltd) all specialising in air quality monitoring technology and service from the late 1980's till 2020.

Jim has led on instrumentation on the original Breathe London Pilot Project in partnership with EDF (Europe) , Google, NPL and others. Jim designed and deployed a large scale network of sensors to measure air quality across the city and also designed and built two Google Street cars featuring reference grade monitors  which ran successfully for almost two years during the project.

Jim also led on the design and deployment of a similar network in Glasgow for the COP 26 conference measuring a number of criteria pollutants and CO2 at a high time resolution in order to better understand localised emissions and how they combine with pollution from elsewhere to make up the total pollution to which the population are exposed.

Recently Jim has deployed a network of sensors on a project funded by Vodafone to demonstrate the effectiveness of deploying air quality sensors on existing communications infrastructure. This has been operating successfully for over three years now and has demonstrated that there is no interference on the sensor performance due to the communications signals. We have also shown that the location of many of the communications assets are ideal for measuring exposure at street level in highly populated areas. Moreover by operating the network at  high speed we were able to  distinguish between pollutants emitted locally, from those drifting into the city from elsewhere.

Deputy Chair: to be elected
Date of next meeting: 19th November 2024