Jade Griffin
Can We Reduce Air Pollution in
Salt Lake City?
Salt Lake City, our beautiful valley home. Find a great spot over looking our city and you will see our lush green mountains and our endless urban area. But most of the time, Salt
Lake City isn’t that beautiful city that we are used to seeing, especially at certain times of the year. We are cursed to live in a cloud of inversion and smog that rests on top of our city that causes horrible health hazards and heats up our city in the summertime, causing dangerous ozone. So is it possible to clear the air of pollution that would result in getting rid of the smog that hangs over us in the winter and summer? Or, are we doomed to live with the inversion as long as we live in Salt Lake City?
Time will tell, as long as we do what other cities have done as I have researched. We may possibly rid the air of dangerous pollutants forever.
We all know what we think of when we see the inversion above our city, that it can’t be healthy for the environment or us. An inversion, also known as a thermal inversion, happens when temperature increases with altitude. It occurs near the Earths surface where a layer of colder air is trapped between the ground and the warm air above it. When this happens, it traps pollution, (emitted from vehicles, building, factories), rather than having it disperse. This is especially hard for us since we are in a valley with surrounding mountains, making it harder for the air to disperse from out city. And this can also lead to major health concerns with people, especially if they have respiratory problems. So with concerns for the environment and people who inhabit a city that coincide with inversions, many towns are starting to take action to fixing this problem. The government and people are starting to turn a new way of life into a greener future for all of us.
Inversion Example
The first solution to solving the air pollution problem, not just in our city but also in every American city, is from an idea mentioned in, “On the
Road to Cleaner Air” written by Jeff
Dale. He discusses how cars are one of the main issues that keep us in this pocket of pollution when inversions happen. “Driving the car to work is probably the biggest environmental sin each of us commits every day”
(Dale). But cars over the past decade have gotten a little better with putting out pollutants into the air than what they used too. The EPA
(Environmental Protection Agency) is planning on cleaning up cars by controlling how much sulfur is in gas.
New regulations, due to the “Tier II” which is part of the Clean Air Act of
1990, hopes to put regulations on both automobiles and gasoline. This new tailpipe regulation will reduce ozone forming pollution in cities,

especially ours, by 3 million tons per year. Which is equal to eliminating
166 million cars from the streets! The next idea for what Salt Lake City should consider, which I have already started to notice, is keeping SUV vehicles off the road. They are one of the big polluters in our town or any town. “Because they were first classified as work vehicles, they were not required to meet as strict emissions requirements as passenger vehicles” (Dale). What Salt Lake City needs to realize is that big, gas guzzling SUV’s are a big hazard to the air that we breath around us, and we need to take action to not drive these tanks around for fun or even at all, so that we may reduce the pollution in our air. Now, I know this isn’t a local solution that our city is doing something about. I just wanted you to get the picture that we are not alone when it comes to smog predicaments, but the EPA is taking action to make sure that we have better cars on the road by 2025. And finally, hoping to reduce pollution in our town so that we may breathe better and have clearer skies to see our beautiful scenery of Salt Lake City.
Some people also speculate that it is impossible to get some pollution out of the air that we breathe. Sally Morgan and Mike
Allaby’s article, “Carbon in the
Atmosphere”, discusses that Carbon is just a natural ingredient that is in our air that we breathe. It enters our atmosphere as CO2 through the carbon cycle, which is a sequence of steps that carbon goes through, from rocks, to air, to living organisms, and back to rocks again. Natural sources are constantly releasing Carbon
Dioxide into the atmosphere everyday, so it seems that we can’t do anything about that, since it is a natural phenomenon with our planet.
We only add to carbon dioxide that is already in the air. What everybody needs to realize is that Carbon Dioxide is also already there, and that we can’t do anything about it. So, the people in
Salt Lake City may never see clear air at all, the inversion may be around until the end of time for all we know.
But, what we do know is that we contribute to the ozone that is already affecting our city and us. Which is why we need to watch what we are putting out into our atmosphere, and help our city become green friendly.
Example of a Carbon Cycle
This leads me to the next solution, discussed by Arthur H.
Rosenfield and others in, “Painting the
Town White-and Green”. What they discuss is the greener ways or ideas that other cities, like L.A., are starting to adopt, ideas to help ease back on all the pollution that they put into the air, which Salt Lake City should start to take into consideration. Due to black rooftops, black pavement, and loss of vegetation (less trees in the city) it gives rise in ozone and even

temperature in urban environment.
We all feel it when we walk around downtown in the scorching summer, and wonder why its a lot hotter downtown than it is by suburban areas and the mountains. Its all do to the black rooftops that Salt Lake City has, along with exposed black pavement. Black absorbs heat, and it slowly rises up into the atmosphere, along with all the emissions that are being added to the ozone right above us causing the inversion that we see today. These are some great solutions to help cool our city and end our contribution of pollution to the air.
Painting rooftops white will help reduce what we put out into the ozone making it cleaner. Since lighter colors reflect sunlight, this would cause the heat, which would have been absorbed by darker colors, to reflect back up into the air and be able to disperse and not contribute to the ozone above us. Resulting in a cooler city and less pollution. Another idea that the authors mention is the planting of trees, lots of trees, along black paved roads. The use of these trees would help drastically in improving our air quality and shade the roads. “Any tree---whether in the forest or the city---removes CO2 from the air through photosynthesis”
(Rosenfield & others). These two solutions have already been proven to have great outcomes in cities in
America, like L.A. So, these solutions could and would help Salt Lake City if we decide to adopt these ideas for future use. And this will hopefully clean our air of pollution. This will take time though, a rough estimate of
15 years, which was concluded in a simulation done for the city of L.A., but now is better than never. And possibly
15 years or even sooner down the road, we will see a change in our city’s air and be able to feel it too.
From all the extensive research that I have conducted, I have come to a conclusion that it is possible to clean out the pollution that lingers over Salt
Lake City. Even though Carbon
Dioxide is already an ingredient in our air that we cant get rid of, but the people of Salt Lake City could at least try to reduce what we are contributing in the already present
CO2. So hopefully after reading this paper, I gave you an idea of what the government is doing to help with solving the pollution problem, along with what other cities have done to help make their town less polluted than it was before, and have gotten results from it too! Salt Lake City will hopefully be a cleaner city in the future if we adopt some of these solutions. But only time will tell, I definitely hope to see that day soon and I think you would all like to, too!

Works Cited:
Rosenfeld, Arthur H., and others. "Painting the Town White--and Green." Technology
Review. Feb./March 1997: 52-59. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 20 Feb 2013.
Morgan, Sally, and Mike Allaby. "Chapter 3.3: Carbon in the Atmosphere." The New
Encyclopedia of Science: Ecology and Environment. Dec. 1 2003: n.p. SIRS Issues
Researcher. Web. 20 Feb 2013.
Dale, Jeff. "On the Road to Cleaner Air." State Legislatures. March 2000: 12-17. SIRS
Issues Researcher. Web. 20 Feb 2013.
Hayden, Thomas. "Blue Skies Ahead: Hot Ways to Cool Down Our Cities." Newsweek
23 Nov. 1998: 12. Gale Power Search . Web. 13 Feb. 2013.