Where there's muck there's money

Companies that sell products that lessen the impact that pollution has on people's health have seen their stocks rise rapidly as more and more people have begun to seek ways to safeguard their health, such as purchasing face masks and air purifiers. Both of these products have seen a sharp spike in sales on online shopping platforms.

Yuan Chengjie, marketing manager of Near Inc., a producer of air purifiers that was established in June 2014 in Shanghai, said that they have seen a noticeable rise in the number of orders this year.

In early February, they started crowdfunding on jd.com, a leading Chinese online retailer, selling advance orders for their machines for 669 yuan. As of press time, it has raised more than 480,000 yuan from nearly 2,500 backers. They will begin to ship the purifiers after March 23.

"The recent discussion has rekindled people's concerns about the smog, widely raised their awareness about the risks it poses and aroused their initiative to buy air cleaners," Yuan told the Global Times.

"But I am concerned about how long the enthusiasm will last. As you know, the interest in this kind of discussion always fades quickly in China, even if it's concerning public health," he said.

But he is confident about the future of the air filter market. There are about 600 brands of air purifiers available in China today and investment in this area is expanding, he said.

"We hope the attention can also help to promote the issue of universal Chinese criteria for air purifiers, so as to standardize the industry. Nowadays prices vary substantially and many makers even falsify test indexes," Yuan said.

Su Jun, director of mobile phone giant Xiaomi's air purifier R&D team, also acknowledged the public's rising concern about air quality.

He told the Global Times that Xiaomi has started to sell a batch of air purifiers once a week since December 16 and that each batch was snapped up in seconds every time. But he refused to reveal the exact sales volume and numbers of advance orders.

More than 100 firms in China begun making air purifiers last year and the domestic demand for air purifiers is and will be considerable, Su said.

An industrial estimate shows that the sales volume of air purifiers may reach up to 200 billion yuan in China by 2020, according to Su, who added that the country's air purifier penetration rate is 0.2 percent, much lower than in neighboring countries (It is 30 percent in Japan and 70 percent in South Korea.)

Meanwhile, so called smog escape tours and insurance claims linked to smog are another consequence of the growing awareness of this problem. After launching a "smog-travel insurance package" last year, China's leading travel company, Ctrip, released a report about smog-evasion tourism on March 6, which listed top destinations and routes taken by Chinese citizens to avoid air pollution.

A solid foundation

An important way of generating change is to bring issues to the attention of the relevant government organs. Several authorities have said that their pollution-reporting hotlines have blown up. The environmental protection bureau in Shenyang, capital of East China's Liaoning Province, claimed that the number of complaint calls they received daily tripled to 140 in recent months and they have tried to respond to every call.

There must be a transition period for the local authorities to learn to cope with a larger number of complaints than they received previously, Ma Jun from PEA said.

He said more than 300 enterprises that have their emissions monitored by the Pollution Map app have recently approached them directly or through environmental protection bureaus, either informing them about the measures they are taking to lower their emissions or claiming that the data was inaccurate due to defective equipment.

According to regulations, all manufacturers are required to install emission and waste monitoring systems, and the data should be collected and supervised by local environmental protection authorities, and this data should also be open to the public.

"But enterprises previously ignored the monitoring data as just a few people paid attention to it. Now it's different, more people have installed the app and more complaints have been made, the enterprises have become quicker to respond," Ma said.

He believes that public enthusiasm about the supervision of emissions should be maintained."It has laid a solid foundation of public opinion for law enforcement and anti-pollution campaigns, and we shall make full use of it," he noted.

Zhao Liang, a project coordinator with Nature University, said they have pledged to thoroughly investigate pollution in Hebei Province this year and write a blacklist of polluters for local law enforcement bodies.

He told the Global Times that they are trying to provide more chances for the public to get involved in reporting, supervising and cracking down on pollution, such as encouraging them to take pictures of pollution problems and forward them to NGOs and law enforcement bodies.

Tian Zuning, project coordinator with Tianjin Green Collar, an environmentalist NGO based in the city, said they are delighted about the rising public attention. "Limited funds sometimes restricted our activities and pollution testing equipment is usually expensive. But now we see more people want to donate to the cause, which has reinforced our confidence in the future activities," Tian told the Global Times.

Ma said PEA is scheduled to launch a new version of the Pollution Map next week and is going to change its name to Blue Map.

"Blue sounds positive. And we will add monitoring data about wastewater discharge, which means several thousand more enterprises will be covered by the app," Ma said, noting that some metropolises have also agreed to offer them data about small-sized plants.