Visit the Death Ticker

The European Environmental Bureau (EEB) has published an online Death Ticker to show that delays to the implementation of environmental performance standards set under the Industrial Emissions Directive (IED) will result in deaths and chronic diseases that could be avoided. Implementation of these standards would force the EU’s largest power plants to reduce emissions by putting in place best available techniques (BATs) that would prevent more than 20,000 annual deaths from air pollution and result in economic benefits of up to €20 billion/year.

The Death Ticker calculates the accumulated external health impact costs which could have been prevented as from 1 August 2014 if BAT had been implemented from that date at the 290 largest coal or lignite-fired large combustion plants (LCP) in the EU. The figures include the external health costs due to some major air pollutants (NOx, SO₂, PM and mercury), but exclude other air pollutants (CO₂ , heavy metals, N2O, etc.) and water-pathway-related damage costs. The information provided by the Death Ticker therefore is an underestimate of the potential external health and environmental costs that would have been prevented as a result of strict enforcement of the LCP BAT conclusions.

Source and link: http://www.eeb.org