Breathe It and Weep: Greenpeace Finds Out What, Exactly, is Going into Our Lungs

We all know that Beijing's noxious air is filled with nasty carcinogens that are bad for you, but Greenpeace has revealed just how bad the air we breathe has become.

The international environmental advocacy group recruited 16 volunteers to wear a "personal pollution sampler" for a few days each this past January and February (during the "Airpocalypse") and found an alarming cocktail of toxic particles:

The first thing we realized when we started the research was that the sampler actually enables you to see the pollution. The filters reveal the amount of toxic particles that enter your lungs during a single day in Beijing.

Then we got the results from the lab. Arsenic, mercury, lead, selenium... a neurotoxic and cancer-causing cocktail. The results are not pretty, and reveal clues to the reasons behind China’s lung cancer epidemic. The WHO recently released the results of a massive research project into what is making us sick, pointing out air pollution as the biggest environmental health risk in the world. The research estimated that 20% of lung cancer cases in China are caused by outdoor air pollution.

Read on here and find out how else the air is affecting our children here.