• Hazardous air pollutants (HAPS): HAPS are released into the air by sources such as chemical plants, dry cleaners, printing plants, and motor vehicles (cars, trucks, buses, and planes). HAPS can cause serious health problems like cancer, birth defects, nervous system problems, and deaths that are all due to people accidentally letting them go into the air.
• Lead: Lead is released by house and car paint as well as the manufacturing of lead batteries, fishing lures, certain parts of bullets, some ceramic ware, water pipes, and fixtures. In young children, lead can cause nervous system damage and learning problems.
• Nitrogen oxides: Nitrogen Oxides are released into the air by burning fuels such as gasoline and coal. When nitrogen oxides combine with VOCs, they can cause breathing difficulty in people who have asthma, coughs in children, and general illness in your respiratory system.
• Ozone: Ozone is released by motor vehicles, industries, burning coal, gasoline, and other fossil fuels, and in the chemicals that are in hairspray and paints. When ozone is close to the ground (ground level ozone) it can cause chest pain, irritated respiratory tract, or persistent cough, can make you unable to take deep breaths, and can make you more likely to get lung infections.
• Particulate matter (PM): PM, little particles of pollution, is released by cars, trucks, and buses that are burning diesel fuel, fertilizers, pesticides, road construction, steel making, mining, and turning on fire places and wood stoves. When PMs mix with air particles and get breathed in by something, they get stuck in the lung tissue. There they can cause increased respiratory disease and lung damage.
• Sulfur dioxides: Sulfur dioxides are released by burning coal, paper production, and melting metal. Sulfur dioxide can harm vegetation, harm metals, and cause lung problems, which include breathing problems and permanent lung damage.
• Volatile organic compounds (VOCs): VOCs are released into the air by burning gasoline, wood, coal, or natural gas, solvents, paints, glues, and other products that are used at work or at home.

Here's what is so important to our understanding of acid rain and protecting the paint and reducing or eliminating its effect on the paint film.

• When acid rain lands on the paint film surface, it does no damage! That' s right; it does not hurt it one bit! However..
• The water evaporates from the paint film, leaving behind dry concentrates of the acid compounds, hydrazine etc. We now have a dioxide, or dry substance of the compound. The vehicle is subjected to water in the form of dew, rain, and the like. The acids are no longer dry. Water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Oxygen is an oxidizer. Ozone is an allotropic form of oxygen, an oxidizer.

• The acid compounds start penetrating into the paint film and concentrating more and more each time the vehicle gets wet with plain water. Each time, these acid compounds eat away more of the paint' s resin system, the former and binder of the paint system. If you look at a highly- magnified cut-away of a base/clear-coat paint system, it resembles a sponge. The resin system is what holds the sponge together That is why acid rain damage is seen as an etch or pit. Part of the system has been corrosively eaten away.