Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. That’s the message users of a new air quality–monitoring app
will be sending to thousands of China’s pollution-spewing factories.
The groundbreaking app, which launched on Monday, provides real-time
data on emissions levels in 190 cities. That’s not all: It also empowers
users to be more than passive observers of smog. Once the app is
downloaded to a smartphone, an everyday citizen can become a
whistle-blower on hazy conditions at the local level.
Read more @ Take Part
How does it work? In January, China’s Ministry of Environmental
Protection mandated that 15,000 of China’s biggest factories publicly
report air emissions every hour. This app takes that unprecedented
information transparency—after all, this is the country that created a fake sun billboard
in Beijing after smog obscured the real one—and plots the updates from
power plants, iron smelters, steel mills, oil refineries, and other
industrial manufacturers on a map. If a factory exceeds emissions
standards, it is highlighted in red. There’s no hiding: Everybody knows
which polluter is making it necessary to bust out the medical mask for a
walk around the block.
You can imagine how tempting it would be for a company to try to
fudge its reporting data. That’s where the real genius of this app comes
into play. If a neighborhood is especially smoggy, even if a company
claims that it meets the discharge standard, a user need only power up
the app, which uses GPS to pinpoint a user’s location and identify the
factories that are closest. Once that’s done, the polluting culprit(s)
will be put on blast.
“It will be a very effective tool for people to voice out their
concerns,” Gu Beibei, senior project manager at the independent
Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, which
created the app to put the data in the hands of the average person, told the AP.
The smartphone-based app is just the latest in a slew of efforts in
China to combat the country’s rampant pollution. Last week the
government announced plans to boot 6 million smog-gushing cars from roads by the end of 2014, and another 5 million in 2015.
So far, thanks to the institute’s technological innovation, 370
companies have been found to be exceeding emissions standards. Perhaps
some serious public shaming (and government fines) can help these
factories get their environmental act together.
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