Those delicious smells may be impacting air quality

A new study finds that air pollutants emitted from cooking can account for nearly a quarter of human-caused volatile organic compounds in dense urban areas.

When it comes to those delicious food smells, the impact could be significant—according to a new study quantifying cooking emissions in the urban air of downtown Las Vegas that was recently published in the journal Coggon and his team of researchers determined that on average, 21% of the total mass of human-caused VOCs present in Las Vegas’ outdoor air were from cooking activities. Depending on the time of day, cooking VOCs ranged from from 10% to 30% of the total.

Given Las Vegas’ particularly high density of restaurants, these measurements may represent the upper range of cooking’s influence on air quality in the U.S. Even so, research in other cities is indicating that cooking emissions may be a big, unsolved piece of the air quality puzzle in major cities worldwide.CSL and CIRES scientists have devoted the better part of 10 years now towards identifying, quantifying, and inventorying the myriad VOCs in urban air that degrade air quality.

So the researchers turned their focus to the invisible, but often tantalizing VOCs given off by grilling, sautéing, searing, or and other cooking techniques., Coggon and his Boulder colleagues outfitted CSL’s mobile laboratory with specialized instrumentation capable of identifying and measuring hundreds of different airborne VOCs and headed west to Las Vegas to find out just how important cooking emissions might be for urban air quality.

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