Smoking indoors = air pollution

In Singapore, Indoor smoking makes air 28 times more polluted.

The study has found that it takes just two lit cigarettes, in an enclosed room the size of a HDB bedroom, to generate 622 microgrammes of pollutants.

That is an air quality that is almost two and half times more polluted than when the PSI is at the hazardous level of 300.

It’s good to hear that the government plans to ban smoking in pubs and clubs next year — just being here (where there is already such a ban in place) for about a month and going to pubs a couple of times and then being able to go home and go to sleep and not reek of cigarette smoke is so fantastic.

(Unfortunately, there are smokers in the house, so we have this strange reverse thing happening.)

News from Scotland a few months after the ban was implemented showed that Scots bar staff health ‘improved’. I’m not even bar staff and my breathing is much better when I’m in the pub and there is nary a lit cigarette to be found.

One complaint I have heard from a smoker was that instead of smelling smoke, one smells sweat instead. And that when winter comes, they have to brave the elements to smoke. I reckon pubs could build glass-walled cubes like those smoking rooms in Changi Airport. Outdoors, of course.

• 31 Oct 2006

• Thinking