In New Delhi, India, customers can visit the Oxypure Oxygen Bar and pay around $7 to inhale pure oxygen for 15 minutes. They can choose scents such as eucalyptus and peppermint, and the bar has even introduced a "pollution special" discount. Earlier this month, officials in India declared a public health emergency when levels of deadly particulate matter rose above what are considered safe levels. Pollution has brought futuristic markets like the oxygen bar, but it has many economic consequences.
There are so many different kinds of pollution that they each have different, and extensive, effects. Pollution in bodies of water, for example, can affect everything from tourism to property values. Nitrates and algal blooms in drinking water sources increase treatment costs. Nitrate-removal systems in Minnesota caused supply costs to rise from 5-10 cents per 1000 gallons to $4 per 1000 gallons. It costs billions of dollars to clean up polluted bodies of water. The tourism industry loses nearly $1 billion each year through losses in fishing and boating activities as a result of nutrient pollution affecting bodies of water. Clean water can raise the value of a nearby home by up to 25%. Plastic pollution in the ocean costs society up to $2.5 trillion per year. Plastic production not only leads to the pollution of the ocean, but the air.
Pollution, especially air pollution, can create large costs due to its effects on people's health. Pollution could lead to as many as 9 million premature deaths by 2060, and welfare costs are projected to rise to as much as $25 trillion. Illness-related costs, such as hospital admissions, are estimated to hit $2.2 trillion.
From its effects on existing industries to its effects on humans' health, pollution clearly has a huge cost. It may create business opportunities like the oxygen bar, but paying for clean air is no real solution. Some have compared the Oxypure Oxygen Bar to the children's movie The Lorax, where the business O'Hare Air sells fresh air in plastic containers at high prices due to the extreme pollution in the story's setting. Is this our future? Pollution could lead to unnecessary payments for things like clean air and water, while many would agree accessibility to these is a basic human right. Whatever the future is, pollution has an impact on the economy and is clearly costing society a great deal right now.
Sources:
https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/effects-economy
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/world/asia/india-pollution.html
https://money.cnn.com/2016/06/10/news/economy/economic-cost-air-pollution/index.html
It is interesting to view the pollution issue from an economic standpoint, especially since most pollution comes from large factories that pollute the air and bodies of water with their production waste. With things with the Oxypure Oxygen Bar, even clean air may start to become a business, where people all over the world in air polluted cities pay money for something we usually take for granted. Hopefully in the future, pollution laws and limits are increased, and we can probably expect that new technologies will eventually replace outdated and polluting methods.
ReplyDeleteBuilding off of Johanna, I also became interested in the bridge between economics and the environment, more specifically, affecting humans. It seems that people will try to make money off of anything, even at the expense of human health. If we want these environmental issues such as air pollution to reduce, we have approach it from an economic standpoint as people are motivated the most economically.
ReplyDeleteAir pollution is one way for some companies to make a lot of money like the Oxypure Oxygen Bar. They take advantage of a decline in the supply of a resource and make people pay because demand is inelastic. Air is the only resource that we currently don't pay that we take for granted, but it will soon also become a business for certain companies
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