Do you fancy a cappuccino frosted with toxic dust? This is one of the unsettling images from a new campaign highlighting the terrible quality of London’s air. Launched by the London mayor’s office this week, the campaign uses heavily soiled everyday objects, including a baby’s bottle, to highlight the need for action over London’s terrible air quality.
This comes in the run-up to the introduction next week of the so-called T-Charge—a £10 ($13.20) levy for older, more polluting vehicles to enter Central London’s Congestion Charge Zone. The T-charge will have to be paid on top of London’s existing £11.50 ($15.20) congestion charge, making it prohibitively expensive to drive more polluting vehicles (typically any car built before 2006) into the zone. In effect, the charge is so high that it’s really a ban. This is in keeping with London’s policy of pricing polluters out of affordable access, as opposed to Paris’ approach of barring all older cars by law.
