AirGradient’s Collaboration with CALM: Clean Air Living Matters UK project

Why does clean air living matter? Well, Marta O’Brien, Head of the CALM initiative can answer that for you. Marta started the CALM (Clean Air Living Matters) project in September 2023 in partnership with RBC (Reading Borough Council), Design Nature, Stantec and the University of Reading to promote clean air in and around schools. Marta is the head of the project, credited by her status as a PhD Researcher at the University of Reading - where I also study!

The programme aimed to: educate students and staff about the causes and effects of air quality as well as ways to tackle air pollution. Their other objectives included: improving awareness of air quality within surrounding schools and the wider Reading community, galvanising students and their parents to make lifestyle changes that will reduce air pollution; typically through school extracurriculars, partnering with other Reading Borough Council initiatives and connecting through school engagement strategies (e.g. those relating to transport and climate change).

But How Has CALM Improved Air Quality in Reading?

RBC set out to engage with at least 33 schools across Reading through the project. As of January 2025, the CALM project had educated thousands of pupils on the topic of air quality across 21 schools in Reading. Whilst this number falls short of the 33 school engagement target, it details how CALM has influenced a large scale of people to commit to learning more about air pollution, an ever-present global threat thanks to the likes of international issues such as climate change. On the topic of climate change, public consensus agrees that burning fossil fuels is the likely cause of this issue. But what about burning other materials, such as wood?

CALM aims to address this problem through smoke control areas; Reading’s new designation, as part of RBC’s new initiative wherein citizens can only burn smokeless or approved fuels with the ‘Ready to Burn’ logo to heat their homes. Reading Borough Council has also set up a school street scheme in Reading to limit cars driving down/parking on school roads during peak times. The smoke control areas were implemented in December 2024 and will allow the Council to impose financial levies on citizens and households to prevent smoke emissions from chimneys as part of CALM’s mission to limit air pollution. One limitation of this novel restriction is the short timeframe in which it has been in effect, thus restricting our ability to determine its success. Nevertheless, schemes like these champion Reading’s plan to inhibit air pollution.

So How Does AirGradient Fit Into All Of This?

In January 2025, AirGradient hosted a forum with Marta O’Brien to discuss the collaboration between CALM and AirGradient, detailing how the CALM project works, how the provision of AirGradient monitors aided them in their mission to educate students about air pollution in Reading, and how the students interacted with the air quality workshops and lab sessions. This was a fruitful collaboration as it combined the power of education with real-life air quality monitoring data, establishing an informative presentation of air pollution monitoring in Reading.

The collaboration involved providing each school (that engaged with the CALM project) with 1 AirGradient ONE and 1 AirGradient Open Air monitor. From there, they monitored indoor and outdoor pollutant concentrations, with the students suggesting ways to improve air quality concentrations (e.g. car sharing, opening windows in classrooms to improve ventilation, creating less fires, etc.)

Additionally, during the outdoor sessions, the students were given a set number of locations to visit where they, using AirGradient monitors, recorded five observations at each site and after that, they tried to determine why the readings varied per location and assessed what actions they could’ve taken to mitigate air pollution exposure. Following the workshops, CALM calculated that there was a 14% increase in awareness around air pollution; 86% confirmed that their workshop participation strengthened their knowledge of air pollution issues.

These statistics exemplify AirGradient and CALM’s commitment to improving education and measuring air pollution, whilst directly contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, specifically goals 4 - Quality Education, goal 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities and goal 17 - Partnership between the goals wherein their collaboration strengthened their unified impact through shared, driven action.

However, it’s necessary to recognise how measuring air quality indoor vs outdoors are two separate matters, especially when using AirGradient’s outdoor air quality monitors which require battery packs to operate (which, in most cases, the schools had to pay for). So, only a few schools managed to install the outdoor air quality monitors.

These partnerships reinforce a strong tenet of AirGradient; community building. By voicing the quintessential services various organisations and projects are providing to strengthen knowledge and inspire actions around the issue of air pollution, we collectively take one step closer towards a future of cleaner air for all.

Sources:

[1] https://sites.reading.ac.uk/connected/2023/03/23/improving-readings-air-quality/

[2] https://www.reading.gov.uk/climate-and-pollution/clean-air-living-matters-exploring-reading-with-schools/

[3] https://www.reading.ac.uk/news/2025/University-News/Community/Air-quality-experiments-teach-school-pupils-about-pollution

[4] https://images.reading.gov.uk/2024/09/CALM-A5-Booklet.pdf

[5] https://media.reading.gov.uk/news/reading-becomes-a-borough-wide-smoke-control-area-from-1-december

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-P_2G4VxRg

[7] https://sdgs.un.org/goals