Air quality standards in associating environmental problems with standards; samples in Turkey and the world

Abstract

Developing technology from the Industrial Revolution and rapidly increasing industryrealized by means of several standards have been accepted across the world and taken its current form.As a result of developing technology and industry, environmental pollution appeared and it has again tried to be prevented through standardizations and its effect to be reduced.One of the environmental problems is air pollution which is defined as the status of foreign particles having weight and density above normal, inside atmosphere effecting environment and human adversely and causing material harm. Air pollution is able to disperse over atmosphere from various resources. Major ones are industry, land, marine time and airway transportation and housing. Pollutants emerge and disperse from these resources as anthropogenic affects upon humans and the environment; they become the indicators of air pollution and significantly decrease the quality of ambient air. With the purpose of improving the air quality in the cities of developed and developing countries, the laws and regulations have brought certain standards and they have started to be applied accordingly. As an example of these standards, the standards towards increasing the air quality and preventing air pollution by the EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency), WHO (World Health Organization) and the European Union Environment Agencycan be given. In our country, "Regulation on Air Quality Assessment and Management", prepared by the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization and the standards together with eight other regulations have been determined.

In this study, air quality standards in the world and the standards in our country are compared according to the pollutants, and the differences were determined. Air qualities in large cities located in our country have been assessed according to these standards.