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.
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)