Will Colour-Changing Shirts Help Reduce Air Pollution?

Every year, more than 10,000 people die in Delhi due to air pollution. This is a threat grave enough because pollution causes lung damage in humans, especially children. Over a year ago, New York Times journalist Gardiner Harris left Delhi because his son found it difficult to cope up with the poor air quality in the national capital. Usually, this goes unnoticed because people get quite used to high pollution levels, notwithstanding the fact that the associated health ailments are serious enough. In a study on schoolchildren in Delhi, it was found that 43.5 per cent of them have poor or restrictive lungs with 27.4 per cent experiencing frequent headaches, and about 15 per cent have eye irritation.
Everybody agrees that something needs to be done. This is why policies intended to fight pollution such as the odd-even rule in Delhi are implemented but nothing much has changed on the ground.
Nikolas Bentel, a designer in New York, has been working to address the issue. Bentel designs clothes that change colour when the air pollution level rises. A black coloured sweater may turn into a polka-dotted one, or will show cheetah prints when the air quality deteriorates. And, such shirts are already on the shelves.
A little expensive at $500, the material is embedded with sensors to monitor air quality. When the air quality level warrants moderate concern for health, the colour of such shirts start changing. The colour patterns on these shirts change entirely when the quality of the air becomes unhealthy. Bentel thinks that if we ignore pollution, air quality levels will decline further with extreme weather conditions becoming a norm.
Strictly speaking, we do not need such shirts because the market is swamped with applications and tools to measure air quality. But people do not seem to use them. People would not want to stay in areas where the quality of the air is poor because such shirts will attract more attention.
But the dystopian world which Bentel envisions, where the atmosphere has become beyond repair is unlikely to happen. Even though the quality of air fluctuates widely, air quality generally improves in the long run. In the United States, for example, the air quality has improved since the 1970s, because the indoor air quality tends to improve when people use less polluting chemicals, and when they use electricity or better sources of fuel. Secondly, vehicular pollution declines when the quality of automobiles improve. And lastly, air quality improves when the government enforces better norms. This is true to a large extent of India as well. Even though many households use firewood and dung as fuel, the number of houses that use electricity and cooking gas has spiked. Vehicle ownership in India will be on a par with the US in a few decades' time. But even this is not likely to raise air pollution, because we are quietly likely to have less polluting automobiles.
So while shirts that reflect the quality of air are very valuable, we would not desperately need them 50 years from now because the atmosphere is likely to be much cleaner then.