Frequently Asked Questions
Air pollution is the release of particles and noxious gases into the atmosphere. These emissions have an impact on human health. The two pollutants of most concern to us are nitrogen dioxide (NO2), which mostly comes from transport, especially diesel, and particulate matter (PM2.5), most of which comes from domestic burning, vehicle tyres and brakes and industry. Indoor air pollution from cooking, wood burning stoves, cleaning products, paints and mould is increasingly recognised as a serious health issue.
Long term exposure to air pollution is linked to over 700 health conditions, such as heart and lung disease, respiratory conditions, dementia and miscarriage, stunted lungs and teenage psychotic episodes. Children and babies are affected more than adults because their lungs are still forming. They are smaller and therefore closer to vehicle exhaust pipes.
If you’re out and about with small children, take quiet back streets instead of main roads. Stay away from the kerb and stand back as you wait for traffic lights to change. Children and babies are at the height of car exhaust pipes so will be breathing in more pollution than you. You can also protect your children by reducing your own contribution to air pollution, by driving less and only burning wood on special occasions, or not at all. You can sign up to the government's air pollution alerts to be alerted of high air pollution episodes.
Any help is really useful to us, no matter how little time you have. We have local groups all over the country, and we’d love you to get in touch if you're interested in helping us to campaign. Take a look at our Get Involved page to see the kinds of things you can do with us, and let us know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to help with! Examples include handing out flyers, giving an assembly at your school, writing letters to interior magazines about wood burning, raising funds or whatever you’re good at! Contact us for more info.
Email our Volunteer Coordinator if you'd like to join the Mums for Lungs family! We may already have a group in your local area, but if not, we'll help you set one up! It always helps if you can find a couple of other people who want to campaign with you, then consider what your main campaign focus is going to be.
You can help to raise awareness of School Streets by chatting to other parents and discussing the issue at Parent Teacher Association meetings. If you think there is support for the idea, you can contact your headteacher and suggest they ask the local council to trial a School Street. Just a note of caution, School Streets are not suitable for every school – for example those on busy main roads. Take a look at our School Streets campaigning guides on our Resources page for more advice.
If your school has an Eco Council, you could work with them to raise awareness of air pollution by taking part in actions for Clean Air Day, Clean Air Night, Walk to School Week and Cycle to School Week. You could approach your headteacher about other anti-pollution measures, such as putting a green screen around the school, moving the playground away from busy roads, or tackling idling drivers outside the school gates. You could also ask your council for traffic calming measures outside the school - widened pavements, greenery, more safe crossing points and cycling infrastructure. A really good first step is to set up your own group of concerned parents. Get in touch if you'd like to chat any of this over!
Air pollution and the climate crisis are bound up together, as fossil fuels play such a large part in both these crises. As well as the toxic gases like nitrogen dioxide which are released when we burn petrol or diesel as fuel in vehicles, carbon dioxide (CO2) is also released. According to the Department for Transport, transport is the largest emitting sector of greenhouse gas emissions producing 30% of the UK’s total CO2 emissions in 2024 .
Having our flyers to hand out can make approaching drivers much easier. Always be kind, friendly and polite! Please don’t knock on car windows, but instead wave and smile and if they open their window, just hand them a flyer, explaining you’re out and about handing out flyers about air pollution from idling. Even if someone doesn’t switch off immediately they might think about it later.
Enforcement of anti-idling lies with local councils. Councils can ask traffic wardens to enforce idling rules, but enforcement is poor because of a lack of resources. There are also loopholes such as the fact that wardens can only fine drivers if they refuse to turn off. You can consider emailing or talking to your ward councillors or cabinet member for environment/traffic/clean air; find out what they are doing and ask them to ensure that parking wardens have the powers to enforce idling.
Let your elected representatives know regularly that you care about air pollution and want more to be done to reduce it. Your MP and councillors are more likely to take action if they know people care about an issue, and if it's in their inbox a lot! We regularly run email campaigns, so sign up for our newsletter and look out for our latest action.
EVs offer some solutions in terms of reducing carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from road transport. However they release around the same amount of particulate matter (PM) into the atmosphere as combustion engines, through tyre wear and the fact that they are generally heavier. Added to this, simply replacing the diesel/petrol fleet with EVs will do little to reduce congestion and make streets safer for walking and cycling.
Mums for Lungs is a small organisation of part-time staff greatly supported by volunteers across the country. As such we need to be very focused in our work; we cannot campaign on everything that impacts air pollution and so we constantly review our priorities. Our campaigns focus on schemes and policies that are proven to reduce air pollution widely and where we believe our voice can have the biggest impact with our limited resources. We are generally focused on holding Government to account and reducing pollution from transport and wood burning. We often collaborate or lend support to other organisations’ campaigns, and we feature all our own campaigns on our campaigns page, so take a look here if you want to know more about them. Please email us if you would like us to support your campaign or if you want to get involved with ours.
No! Everyone is welcome - we have many dads, grandparents and those who do not have children who support and campaign with us. We chose the name Mums for Lungs because we were on maternity leave when we started the group, and we liked the way it sounded! We’ve grown to become the leading grassroots campaign for clean air in the country - and the name is here to stay.