this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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Public Health

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Inhalers drive carbon emissions equivalent to 530,000 cars each year, study shows (phys.org)
submitted 16 hours ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/publichealth@mander.xyz
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Inhalers are the frontline treatment for asthma and COPD, but they come with a steep environmental cost, according to a new UCLA Health study—the largest to date quantifying inhaler-related emissions in the United States.

Researchers found that inhalers have generated over 2 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually over the past decade, equivalent to the emissions of roughly 530,000 gas-powered cars on the road each year.

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[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Cool.

How much is a megagram of carbon? or of CO2? How many trees is that?

What do you picture when you think of that? Is it something you have an intuitive reference for? Almost assuredly you don't. Very few people do could tell you about how many hectares of a typical temperate first would be required to be set aside annually to store or sequester that 500k megagrams of carbon (hint: alot).

Hand wringing because they didn't use a unit even, likely, that you would likely have no clue how to understand it's interpretation, is misguided at best.

It's appropriate to communicate through units people understand; the real problem is their use of a number which is also practically incomprehensible. Using cars is fine, using 500k is problematic, because few if any human has a context for what 500k cars looks like.

A more appropriate units conversion might have been that the inhalers have emissions equivalent to all the vehicle emissions of states A, B and C

[–] finitebanjo@piefed.world 1 points 13 minutes ago* (last edited 12 minutes ago)

That might have been only slightly more appropriate but even then it doesn't represent one industry to another but instead some arbitrary metric.

If Carbon Emissions were a Pie then this would be just one incredibly tiny sliver.