Jennifer Dranttel - Material innovation to jump-start citizen action in one of the world's most polluted cities

De Montfort University researcher Jennifer Dranttel is developing design-based solutions to the problems facing Mongolia- one of the world’s most climate-change impacted countries.

The capital of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, is now home to 1.6 million people – more than 60 per cent of the country’s population, and the city is situated in a valley that holds on to the pollution.

Jennifer said: “The country’s problems were brought home to me when I was working as a teacher in Ulaanbaatar. We always had to wear a mask indoors in the classrooms and you could sometimes look down the school corridor and only see halfway as the pollution even indoors was so bad.”

Pollution in the country, which outside of the capital is one of the least dense in the world, is attributed to one in every nine deaths. It has been recognised by the United Nations as an area of humanitarian concern.

Much of the population live in traditional circular tents or gers, more commonly known by the anglicised word yurts. It is a way of nomadic life and the circular ger is important to people’s culture and history representing the cosmos.

The gers bring particular problems as people will burn rock coal, rubbish, or anything they can to keep warm in minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter but the fumes are dangerous to health.

Jennifer’s experiences in Mongolia and her expertise led to research into how the harmful fumes from the fires burning in the gers could be mitigated.

She used mycelium – a fungus that eats the harmful fumes - to add to the wool lining the fabric of the ger and reduced the harmful effects.

Jennifer said: “People were told that that they should live in apartments, but that was not their culture over three millennia and the people did not want that. The ger had a spiritual and cultural significance in their way of life.

“This solution meant they could continue that way of life, but the harmful effects of the fires were diminished by devising a design intervention to the fibres - embedding an air-purifying lichen or algae into the felted wool - that will improve life within the ger, and still honour Mongolian traditions.”