Virginia Announces Cleanest Air in 20 Years

After years of work to improve the air quality in Virginia, the Department of Environmental Quality announced that the summer of 2017 was the cleanest ground-level ozone season in the commonwealth in the past 20 years.

In the 1990s, many areas in Virginia regularly struggled to meet the old ozone health standards of 120 parts per billion, but this summer the state only failed to meet the new standard of 70 parts per billion on four occasions.

Levels of pollutants such as ozone, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and particulate matter have all fallen, according to the agency.

— Otto Solberg