Air, Noise and Odour Pollution and Control Technologies

Abstract

One of the major and pressing challenges in today’s world faced by developed and developing nations alike is atmospheric pollution in the form of air, noise and odour pollution. Nations’ quests towards perpetual economic growth coupled with increasing population load requires vast and extensive exploitation of natural resources. In this process of walking the path of ‘progress’ and to achieve ‘development’, an enormous amount of unwanted and potentially harmful waste products are released into atmosphere on a regular basis. Societies for long have failed to understand the carrying capacity of atmosphere till the point where the atmospheric pollution has not only started to affect the wellbeing and health of people, vegetation, caused damages to crops and wildlife but also affected the climate and resulted in depletion of natural resources. For developing nations, the challenges are particularly critical as in one hand the polluting sources include onus from industrial development where as in other hand poverty, lack of management and related sources such as solid fuel burning and poor management of waste becomes equally important factor. Although air pollution can be caused by both natural and anthropogenic activity, but here we restrict our discussion to man-made pollution only.