In Sunday's NYT, correspondent Edward Wong in Beijing has a powerful essay on the realities of living in a country where you are afraid to breathe the air. What he reports rings depressingly true to me. You can't say it often enough: the main challenge to China's continued development, and even to the government's ongoing legitimacy, is environmental sustainability in all aspects. Air, water, soil contamination, toxic food supplies, plus emissions overall. Sustainability is of course the challenge for the modern world as a whole, heavily affected by both China and America; but the situation is simply more dire and immediate in China.
Which brings me to: a reader's suggestion for a lower-cost alternative to the very expensive air-purifying systems that many Chinese and foreigners rely on in China, and that Wong describes in his article. These are usually bulky devices that go for many hundreds or even thousands of dollars. My wife and I called the one in our Beijing apartment "the iron lung."
But now Thomas Talhelm, a Fulbright scholar now living in Beijing, has experimented with building his own fine-particulate air filter. The latest "airpocalypse" in Beijing, he writes in a note, "inspired me to do some (personal) research into how air filters work, and I discovered how to make a simple HEPA air purifier for 166 RMB that my data shows works as well as the 11,000 RMB 'IQ Air' at removing particulate pollution form the home." The GIF above shows what the filter removed from the air in his apartment. His search for a cheaper workaround is in the finest (sincerely) tradition of Chinese improvisation, and it means the difference between around $26 for the home-made version and around $1750 for the very popular [among the well-heeled], high-end IQ Air.
You can see more of his findings at his Tumblr site, Particle Counting. He's not an atmospheric scientist, and neither am I. But I would be giving his approach a try if I were there. Readers on scene, check it out. And, if you'd like to compare this with high-end commercial models, consider reviews here and here by a Beijing-based Western MD.
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