How can China’s cities reduce air pollution?

Asian Correspondent , Monday, November 25, 2013
Correspondent : Graham Land

In Sweden, where I lived for many years, it can get pretty cold. Shocking news, right? As you might expect in a wealthy country with a high standard of living, housing is built to insulate against harsh weather and remain toasty and warm even when it’s snowin’ and blowin’ outside. I never paid a heating bill in Sweden (they’re included in the rent or housing cooperative fees) and during winter I felt far more often too hot indoors than too cold.

One way the Swedes keep warm is by burning garbage. In fact, since recycling is also so high in the country, they don’t have enough garbage to burn. So they import it from Norway. Does burning garbage pollute? Surely, but so does coal and heating oil and you don’t have to mine the garbage. Plus, you’re getting rid of waste instead of throwing it into a landfill.

In China, where pollution levels are nothing but shocking, one city has decided to take a cue from Sweden and do something similar. Shijiazhuang, one of the country’s dirtiest urban areas is implementing a scheme in one of its neighborhoods that uses extra heat from industrial waste water to heat homes.

The program in Lijingwan uses effluent from a refinery to warm clean water before the clean water is heated again by efficient electric boilers in basements. The combination of hot industrial waste water and efficient boilers can cut energy consumption by 44 percent, the local heating office said.

For the Lijingwan neighborhood alone, that means 868 tonnes of coal could be saved in a single winter.

If anywhere needs a system like this it is China. There is so much smog in Beijing that last January – during the city’s infamous “airpocalypse” – a factory fire went unnoticed. And things keep getting worse.

By any measure of air quality, Beijing’s air is very very bad – up to forty times the World Health Organization’s limits on particulates, so high that the monitoring instruments aren’t even reliable at these levels. This supersmog is blamed for over a million pre-mature deaths in China each year. Beijing is one of the worst of many cities.

Bring on the waste-to-energy system, I say. Unfortunately the main ways China seems to be addressing their air quality woes is by more importing of natural gas (more fracking) and by building more nuclear power plants.

On the other hand, tackling the immediate health risks of air pollution has the added benefit of reducing the long-term effects of greenhouse gas emissions, i.e., climate change.

China’s slower growth of emission is linked to its attempts to improve its air pollution that rather than being linked to international efforts to improve climate change. However, the source of both its hazardous air pollution and its CO2 emissions is its reliance on coal to fuel its massive economic growth. So efforts to improve its air quality will also bring reductions in CO2 emissions.

It’s almost as if we’re lucky that industrialization has so many negative consequences – someone’s bound to act on at least one of them!

 
SOURCE : http://asiancorrespondent.com/116346/how-can-chinas-cities-reduce-air-pollution/
 


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