How much pollution does a plane put out
by ethan
(denver)
We're outta here.
I an doing a persuasive speech abut global warming and I need help about the outside pollution machines. The one that really stumps me is the airplane. I need to find out how much pollution it gives off. I also need a long list about fifteen to research on. If you can help thanks
Barry's Response - The first place I checked was the US EPA list of air pollution emission factors, known as AP-42.
See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_42_Compilation_of_Air_Pollutant_Emission_Factors
No luck. But after poking around on the epa.gov website, I was able to find this page on aircraft emissions. https://www.epa.gov/oms/aviation.htm
They may appear quite cumbersome, but emission factors work in a manner such as:
mass of emission per amount of fuel used
or
mass of emission per amount of distance travelled
Once you figure it out, it should be quite straightforward. I hope it helps. Good luck with this.
Afterwards, I found another example for making this kind of calculation on the Norwegian Air website. In this case, a Boeing 737 expels 88 grams per passenger per kilometre. So if this baby holds 200 passengers and goes 1000 km (about 620 miles), that would work out to 17.6 tonnes (about 19 tons) on this trip. Sounds like a lot, but they compared it with various forms of ground transportation and it ended up quite efficient, all things considered.
The real culprit is
air pollution from cars. Why? Because there are so many of them. You just might need to visit a number of informative web resources to get to the bottom of this one.
Search this site for more information now.