Summary:

The air pollution situation of many European urban areas doesn't present indications of substantial improvement, in spite of the adoption of technological interventions for emission limitations and processes for source reduction; actually, these actions, without other activities, like clear understanding of emissive and atmospheric phenomena influencing the result, are not able to lead the air quality back to desired
standards.

The air quality situation is even more critical in areas like northern Italy, where the pollution levels (in particular PM10 and NO2) are very high because of the low wind conditions of the Po Valley that don't help the dilution of the pollutants. In order to obtain some improvements for air quality, the regional decision makers are trying to define some intervention policies, such as the limitation of old vehicles, in particular diesel cars before EURO II and gasoline cars before EURO I. The present paper deals with PM emissions from traffic, considering exhaust and non-exhaust particles, from civil heating plants and industrial plants.

The investigated area is the town of Cuneo, placed in the South of Piedmont, N-W Italy; the town has 50,000 inhabitants and the surrounding area is characterized by the presence of two cement factories, a glass manufacture and a tyre production plant.

URL: http://www.scipub.org/fulltext/ajes/ajes33166-174.pdf