Water Based Coatings vs. The Smog Monster

Do you remember the movie, "Godzilla vs The Smog Monster"? What a classic. I must have watched that movie half a dozen times at the old Rivoli Theater in my hometown of Rutherford, NJ when I was a kid. I would sit and watch Godzilla save the day as he put a serious whoopin’ on the evil smog-generating destroyer of Tokyo. Who would have thought that a prehistoric reptile who was resurrected by the atomic age would rise up to save the world from an acidic, smog- festering mass of industrial waste that could also fly at super-sonic speeds. I wish I thought of that movie script…

Maybe the real-life movie should now be called Water-Based Coatings vs. The Smog Monster.
Smog is a popular term used to describe polluted air. It was originally used as an abbreviation of the combination of coal smoke and fog that, along with sulfur dioxide vapor, characterized polluted air in London and other British cities in the 1950s. The term came into more widespread use as a summary description for the quite different pollution mixture of ozone (O₃) and other photochemical oxidants (e.g., hydrogen peroxide, hydroxyl radical peroxy acetyl nitrate) that characterized the air pollution in Southern California beginning in the 1950s, and in many other urban areas in the United States in the decades that followed. In the United Kingdom, the smog was black and acidic, while the smog in California was lighter in color and more highly oxidizing.