Air Pollution Alert!
Tackling Pollution
The heavy smog earlier this year may have been a blessing in elaborate disguise. If there’s one good thing that came out of it, it is that the public grew extremely concerned over the quality of the air they breathe and health problems associated with it. Calls for action grew. People took their own measures to allay their concerns. Air purifiers sold like hotcakes across the country, and the price of special-purpose PM 2.5 facemasks soared.
Data from the Beijing Marketing Department of the Gome Electrical Appliances show that in the five days from January 25 to 29 Gome sold five times the number of air purifiers over the same period in 2012. Even its most expensive model, retailing for over RMB 3,000, flew off the shelves. Demand was such that when purifiers sold out, customers would purchase air conditioners with air purifying functions.
Online retails also did well out of the pollution scare. On taobao.com, China’s go-to online shopping portal, sales of air purifiers so far this year are up 575.7 percent over the same period in 2012. On suning.com, a Taobao rival, air purifiers top the list of most commonly purchased items.
Wang Fang, vice chairman of Shanghai Indoor Contamination Control Industry Association (SICCA), cautioned buyers that air purifiers’ effectiveness in filtering out PM 2.5 depends on room size and concentration of PM 2.5 in the air. Bigger rooms require bigger filters, and settings should be continually adjusted in line with changing concentration of the matter. Even with an air purifier, staying up to date with the latest pollution readings is important. Perhaps even more importantly, the purifier’s filter should be changed regularly – otherwise, the purifier itself can become a source of pollution.
Protective facemasks have been the other big seller this year. However not everyone has been convinced of the merits of wearing such a mask. Some maintained fine particles make their way to the lungs no matter how good the mask in question. Again, the answer lies in regularly changing the mask’s filter. Disposable masks should be changed every day.
Facing heavy smog, city folks are displaying an increasing preference for trips to the suburbs, or even further to the mountains or seaside. For longer-term travel destinations, many are heading to “clean nature” spots, most of which are said to be in the south of the country. Real estate agents looking to cash in on the mania have started boasting about the clean air environments around houses as much as the houses themselves.
Some are taking a more holistic approach to fighting the pollution. Director of the Guangde Chinese Medicine Outpatient Department Ji Jie remarked, “According to TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) theories, we should adapt to the environment. In the short term, it is impossible to sculpt the environment to our will, so it’s best to improve our internal resistance – our immune system – to cope with the challenge.”
Fighting Smog at Source
When it comes to actually ridding the environment of smog, tackling harmful pollutants at their source is key.
Wen Xiangcai pointed out that since the aerosphere is an inherently dynamic system, localized purifying methods would not solve the issue entirely. Controlling emissions in the first place should be a priority. China has been busy learning from foreign experiences and set up regional joint control systems to ensure pollution-tackling measures are comprehensive. The 13 key regions in the initiative include the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and city agglomeration in central Liaoning Province, the Shandong Peninsula, and Wuhan (capital of Hubei Province) and its environs. At the end of 2012, the 12th Five-year Plan on preventing air pollution demanded that the 47 cities covering 14 percent of the total territory of China reduce PM 2.5 levels 5 percent by 2015.
Recently, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) proposed a plan to set a cap on the country’s greenhouse emissions. The proposal still needs to be accepted by China’s State Council. Once adopted, the country will set out to reduce absolute emissions of CO2. Currently the country has pledged to cut its “carbon intensity” – the amount of CO2 produced per RMB 10,000 of economic output – by about 40 percent over 2005 levels by 2020.
Tackling pollution has required tangible government action, but ordinary people and non-governmental organizations can help as well. The smog earlier this year spurred many to act.
Recently an international seminar series on “eco-civilization” development and Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP) was jointly initiated by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Elion Green Foundation and Beijing Normal University. The GEP is the brainchild of the IUCN and aims to set up an analytic and accounting system to include the eco-environment in GDP measures. It incorporates the gross value of the production of forests, deserts, wetlands and artificial ecosystems of farmland, pasture and aquafarms of a given country into wealth and income measures.
President of IUCN Zhang Xinsheng remarked that the GEP accounting project is helpful in assessing the status of an ecosystem in a scientific and feasible way, and is a stepping-stone to further integration of ecological measures with national economic statistics.
Beijing is one of the cities most seriously afflicted by the smog this year. In response, the municipal government has implemented a series of clean air measures for 2013. Sixty-nine initiatives were listed to improve air quality, ranging from macro-measures like shutting down the heaviest polluters and encouraging conversion to clean energy, to micro-measures like tightening restrictions on smoke from barbeque restaurants and chemical emissions from drycleaners.
Beijing will also remove 180,000 old, high-polluting motor vehicles from its roads, set aside an additional 350,000 mu (15 mu = one hectare) of land for afforestation efforts, reduce emissions of hazardous organic compounds by 5,000 tons and ensure local coal burning does not exceed 21.5 million tons in volume.
“The environmental issues facing China have also confronted other countries in their economic development. When we see a problem, we have to face it calmly,” Wen Xiangcai said.
“The environment is so important – it influences everyone and every industry. Eliminating high-polluting production methods and lifestyles and carrying out economic activities with an eye to environmental sustainability is important both now and for our descendants,” Wen concluded.
