[Editorial] Fine dust

The government has poured more than 3 trillion won ($2.5 billion) into the air quality control sector over the past decade. However, a revelation from the Board of Audit and Inspection indicated that the ministry had failed to identify the main pollutants causing air pollution and erroneously measured the amount of fine dust in the air.

The fine dust that swept over the Seoul metropolitan area and some major cities over the past two months came mostly from China and Mongolia’s sand storms. But a variety of experiment data showed that emissions from domestic manufacturing factories and running vehicles make up a large portion of the dust, which contains pollutants including carcinogens.

As far as taxpayers are concerned, it does not make for easy listening to hear the BAI news that the Ministry of Environment was neglecting core sources of dust nationwide and the fact that air has no territorial boundaries. The ministry was found to have concentrated too much on Seoul and its surrounding cities in mapping out countermeasures.

Pollutants emitted by the coal, steel and thermoelectric power plants in cities in South Chungcheong Province, including Cheonan, contributed to up to 21 percent of the fine dust and up to 28 percent of ultrafine dust in the second half of 2015. But in their countermeasures, policymakers had not included these plants in their monitoring list of key sites that cause fine dust.

Lax policy is also seen on the technical side. Some fine dust sensors used to detect dust levels had not lived up to the standards of a margin of error of less than 10 percent. As for ultrafine dust sensors, 35 out of 65 devices did not work properly.

Furthermore, whether it was intentional or a simple mistake, performance targets were overestimated.

The ministry had said that it exceeded its target of reducing fine dust by 8,567 tons in 2014. Although it said it had reduced fine dust by 15,859 tons in its assessment report, the actual decrease was found to be 8,360 tons of dust.

Over recent decades, the nation’s air quality has drastically declined due to emissions from industrialized cities.

Fine dust is too small to be seen with the naked eye and is difficult to filter. Trapped in the atmosphere, fine dust can easily enter the human body through the respiratory system and cause health damage, especially to the lungs and blood vessels.

The World Health Organization set up an air quality guideline in 1987 to create better awareness. In 2013, the WHO-run institute International Agency for Research on Cancer declared that fine dust was classified as a carcinogenic substance.