Facts on ozone

By S. G. Yap.

I write pertaining to the article titled A Toast to Garbage, Weekender, July 26.

I am a civil engineer and would like to highlight that the notion that “the production of garbage enzyme generates ground level ozone . . . live in a smog-free environment” is inaccurate.

The interviewee seemed to have misunderstood the effects of ground-level ozone (tropospheric ozone) and high-altitude ozone (stratospheric ozone), or the so-called bad and good ozone.

Garbage enzyme in production.

Ozone is both beneficial and damaging to life forms depending on where it is located. Ozone near the earth surface is harmful to life forms.

It primarily affects the eyes and the respiratory tract and is also one of the major causes of smog.

Ozone can be beneficiary when it is found at a high altitude or the stratosphere (approximately 10km-80km above ground.) At a high altitude, the ozone filters out the harmful UV light.

However, ozone produced at the ground is not the source of this high altitude ozone. High-altitude ozone is formed from the interaction of high-altitude oxygen and the sun’s rays.

Ground-level ozone can be formed both naturally or due to human activities (industrial actitivies, photostating etc.) including composting.

The effort by the interviewee in composting waste is commendable as it reduces the waste that needs to be transported to a landfill site and also returns organic nutrients to the soil.

A point to note, however, is that anaerobic composting (in the lack of oxygen) produces methane which is 21 times more potent than CO2 as a green house gas.

To protect our environment, it is recommended to practise more aerobic composting by stirring/mixing the composting waste more often to introduce oxygen to the waste and thereby reducing the production of methane and other volatile organic compounds including ozone.

I sincerely hope the above could be conveyed to your readers to rectify the misconception of trying to replenish high-altitude ozone by producing ground-level ozone which can be harmful.

-Article sourced from here-