Improved Public Health
Replacing fossil fuels with ethanol not only reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but also improves air quality and reduces the health impacts of pollution. That’s because using ethanol in the transportation sector decreases ozone formation (when replacing gasoline) and particulate emissions (when replacing diesel).
Research by the Air Pollution Laboratory at São Paulo University’s Faculty of Medicine (for more read the “Ethanol and Health” study) confirmed ethanol’s health benefits by studying the vehicle fleet of São Paulo, South America’s largest and most densely populated city. The researchers found that replacing gasoline and diesel with ethanol in that one city would:
- Save 1,400 lives per year
- Prevent more than 9,000 hospital admissions per year
- Save the government more than US$190 million annually
Since air pollution is a recognized problem that affects other densely-populated regions, the results of this study can be extrapolated to other metropolitan areas with similar characteristics.
Written by Eduardo Leão de Sousa, Executive-Director at UNICA The elephant is the heaviest terrestrial animal on our planet. On average, it weighs 5 tonnes. Now, imagine 100 million of them placed on a giant scale, whose balance pan is the size of a large city, such as Mexico City or Bangkok. The result of […]WHAT'S NEW
Sugarcane harvest for South Central Brazil for the second half of November 2020 Read on