China trying to fight smog creatively

Officials are looking at washing away air pollution with artificial rain or sucking it up with giant vacuum cleaners. Shanghai has given its cops mini-filters to put in their noses.
Beyond the government, a cottage industry has popped up, tinkerers who are producing anti-pollution devices — some practical, others wacky artistic statements.
There is a bicycle that purifies air as you pedal. And a growing spectrum of do-it-yourself air-filtering machines, from simple duct-tape concoctions to elaborately engineered models. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
“It’s a perfectly natural response when you are confronted with a problem,” said Gong Zhiqiang in Beijing, a mechanical engineer who spends his nights fine-tuning his designs for amateur air filters.
After Gong posted his prototypes online in 2012, requests flooded in for step-by-step instructions. Obsessing over air, he said, has become a nationwide pastime.
The urgent search for ways to alleviate pollution has been spurred by the problem’s growing visibility as well as the public’s increased access in recent years to hourly measurements of the filth they’re breathing.
Chinese cities have some of the world’s most polluted air. The haze is often so thick it blots out the sun. On especially bad days in cities such as Harbin, in northeast China, residents can’t even see across the street. Airports struggle regularly to land planes in thick fog. A study published in the British medical journal the Lancet attributed 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010 to bad air.
Other countries have cut air pollution by limiting emissions from factories and cars. China’s leaders have been reluctant to sacrifice economic growth, and state-run industries have used their economic clout to resist stricter rules. So people have looked to more novel ideas.
In the western city of Lanzhou — deemed by the World Health Organization as having the worst air in China — officials have proposed digging gullies into surrounding mountains. Others have talked in recent years of leveling mountains altogether. But the ideas, requiring mountain-sized funding, have stalled.
On the sci-fi end of the spectrum, a Dutch artist is designing a giant electrostatic “vacuum cleaner.” The device — which resembles a giant hula-hoop — uses an electrified wire to attract smog particles. The artist’s firm says it has successfully tested prototypes. In an online video demonstrating the concept, the machine miraculously cuts a small circle in the city’s haze to reveal blue skies and a shining sun.
A document released by China’s Meteorological Administration in November said that all local weather officials would be able by 2015 to use artificial rain to clear away smog. Shortly after, in a closed meeting, Beijing’s vice mayor told subordinates his city was researching the method, according to state-run media.
Bloggers reacted with equal parts surprise, jokes and skepticism. In many ways, the idea is unsurprising. Because of China’s chronic water shortages, it has invested heavily in artificial rain since the late 1950s. The country boasts the world’s largest rainmaking force, with 6,902 cloud-seeding artillery guns, 7,034 launchers for chemical-bearing rockets, more than 50 planes and 47,700 employees, according to a 2012 government tally.
The massive infrastructure was most famously deployed in Beijing to ensure clear skies for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics.
But applying rainmaking to smog is a relatively new idea. Several scientists at government think tanks and universities declined a journalist’s requests this month to discuss it. Such information remains, like many things in China, under the tight control of the government.
According to the few scientists who were willing to talk, as well as explanations in state-run media, the science involves using rockets, cannons or planes to sow clouds with catalysts such as dry ice, silver iodide and salt powder. The substances augment the clouds’ natural rainmaking processes.
The resulting rainfall in theory scavenges polluting particles from the air through a process called “wet deposition.” But the plan has serious flaws, many experts say.
The right moisture conditions are needed for cloud seeding to work. The location of a city’s largest concentration of pollution must be determined. And the rainfall can be fickle and difficult to aim.
The only real solution to China’s pollution problems, scientists stress, is to cut emissions from its power plants, factories and cars. But that is hugely difficult. It would mean cutting into China’s heavy dependence on coal-burning electrical plants. It also would require taking on powerful state-owned industries, such as China’s oil and power companies, which have long resisted stricter environmental controls.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS