They didn’t show their methodology but their math seems way off.
Google says 1 car emits 4,500 kg co2 per year.
Assuming 1 inhaler is completely filled with the environmentally worst HFC propellent ( no medicine just propellent) you get 27 kg of CO2 equivalent from 1 inhaler.
Google says 60 to 200 doses per inhaler.
4500/27 = 166 inhalers = 9,960 doses to equal a car.
Google says 2 doses a day is worst case.
That’s 13 years of inhaler use to equal 1 year of a car.
That’s 13 years of inhaler use to equal 1 year of a car.
Yeah, and since there are 70 million inhalers prescribed each year, and the majority of them are puffer inhalers, we could say 51% are puffers and the emissions impact is equivalent to 70 million inhalers / 13 inhaler-years per car-year * 51% => 2,746,153 cars.
I assume that it’s 5 times too large because the inhalers are not just filled with propellant and nothing else, but that seems roughly on par. Right? To me, the takeaway is that if a lot of inhalers are one-thirteenth as bad as driving a car, then that means this is a significant thing to look at (especially for people for whom there is a trivial way to replace it with something else). Maybe they picked a misleading way of presenting that fact but it doesn’t seem false to me.
They didn’t show their methodology but their math seems way off.
Google says 1 car emits 4,500 kg co2 per year.
Assuming 1 inhaler is completely filled with the environmentally worst HFC propellent ( no medicine just propellent) you get 27 kg of CO2 equivalent from 1 inhaler.
Google says 60 to 200 doses per inhaler.
4500/27 = 166 inhalers = 9,960 doses to equal a car.
Google says 2 doses a day is worst case.
That’s 13 years of inhaler use to equal 1 year of a car.
Yeah, and since there are 70 million inhalers prescribed each year, and the majority of them are puffer inhalers, we could say 51% are puffers and the emissions impact is equivalent to 70 million inhalers / 13 inhaler-years per car-year * 51% => 2,746,153 cars.
I assume that it’s 5 times too large because the inhalers are not just filled with propellant and nothing else, but that seems roughly on par. Right? To me, the takeaway is that if a lot of inhalers are one-thirteenth as bad as driving a car, then that means this is a significant thing to look at (especially for people for whom there is a trivial way to replace it with something else). Maybe they picked a misleading way of presenting that fact but it doesn’t seem false to me.
(https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/09/is-your-asthma-inhaler-bad-for-the-environment for the 70m figure)