Pollution in your home

The chances are you have spent around 90% of your life indoors and 70% of that time cocooned inside your own home. Conventional wisdom has it that once inside – as long as there are no lit cigarettes and the windows are shut – we are safe from air pollution and its associated death statistics that frequent news headlines. But that isn’t true. Nina Notman meets the chemists using analytical chemistry to improve our understanding of indoor air pollutants. Catherine Smith suggests ideas and classroom resources to bring this story into mass spectrometry lessons.