Air Quality Apps and Bottled Air Thrive On Beijing's Pollution

itwbennett writes "Here's a bright spot in Beijing's off-the-chart bad air pollution: The market for mobile apps that monitor air quality is thriving. 'When the pollution went beyond the air quality index, all the social networks in China and media began paying attention to the problem,' said Wang Jun, one of the developers of the China Air Pollution Index app. 'This caused the downloads to increase 30 times.'" Obviously a Spaceballs fan, a Chinese man is even selling fresh air in cans.

Related projects

[jago25_98]

One way to measure quality - Sensordone, air quality and other sensors via bluetooth keyring thingy kickstarter project:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/453951341/sensordrone-the-6th-sense-of-your-smartphoneand-be [kickstarter.com]

Related: Air cleaning plants (previously from slashdot)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_air-filtering_plants [wikipedia.org] (testing: http://cur.lv/redirect.php?code=fwrm [cur.lv] )

Re:Yanno

[istartedi]

And if oil companies weren't providing you with power, you wouldn't be able to write self-righteous posts on the internet.

Given that petrolium is about 1% of the fuel for generating electricity in the US [wikipedia.org] there is a good chance that oil companies aren't providing him with any power at all.

Of course coal is filthy and provides 44.9% of the power; but oil companies are the whipping-boy, so carry on!

Re:Idiotic...

[mister_playboy]

Obviously, selling bottled air is a 'good idea' if you can get people to buy it; but what possible sense does that make as a strategy for coping with pollution?

The canned fresh air is a bit of dark humor. The guy selling it is a wealthy philanthropist making a political statement.

Re:Idiotic...

[pushing-robot]

And with 'flavors' [stuff.co.nz] like "pristine Tibet" and "post-industrial Taiwan", perhaps slightly subversive humor as well.

Re:Yanno

[Rich0]

Maybe, but Japan looks exactly the same and they don't have the same legal structure. I think it is a culture thing.

The lack of regulation issue is real. In the US the average person uses oil or gas to heat their home, and both are reasonably clean from an emissions standpoint (I'm guessing the fuels are regulated). In China most homes use this compressed coal dust stuff for fuel and it is sooty as all get out, likely inefficient, but also dirt cheap.

Re:Yanno

[guises]

China has plenty of small villages, that's where most of the population lives. That isn't the reason for the smog, it's the power plants. What you're implying is that cities are necessarily dirty and that's just not the case. Plenty of people in New York and the air is perfectly breathable. Shanghai recently spent a lot on setting up filtration for its coal-fire power plants and the air quality improved a fair amount. Still has a long way to go, but that's clearly where the problem is.