A new study on the world’s first-ever market for trading particulate emissions, which are tiny particles that can impact human health, revealed that employing the market mechanism helped reduce pollution by 20-30 per cent in an industrial cluster in Surat.

Published in the May issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the study saw researchers compare the emissions performance of participating plants with those complying with the business-as-usual pollution standards. It covered 162 plants, predominantly in the textile sector.