[Sleuth]

Well, no doubt this is the most poluted out of al of those places you mentioned.
I woud suggest you stay away from Beijing and Xian and all of Shandong Province, for that matter.

[abdi]

okaaaaay...........its not good is it? But I have to come with kids, soooooooo do those air purifiers work?

[Sleuth]

Not so good. Try to live away from Central/TST.
Air purifiers are a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Consumer Reports in the US did a lot of research on them, suggest you try their website.
Also try searching this site and Geobaby for air purifier threads and you will soon know more than you ever wanted to know about them.

[taihunggao]

Originally Posted by Sleuth

But I do wish they would stop building the coal fired power plants and clean the air. It can be done and is being done all across the West. These guys just don't want to spend the money, which is a terrible reason to pollute the planet.

just cos you don't see what's going on behind the scenes, doesn't mean nothing is going on behind the scenes! i'm probably gonna get flamed defending HK Electric; but I see them spending a lot of money on scrubbing equipment, new gas plant. I see billions of dollars spent every year on environmental equipment, and that investment is just going up and up. People are working on this, engineers are dedicating their lives to fixing this. But, change takes time.
China is shutting down its smaller dirty coal fired plant, and yet this is hardly ever publicised. Each of the big five Chinese utilities have committed to shutting down around 5GW of dirty plant by 2010. That's around 80 300MW coal plants shutdown.
Maybe it's not enough, and the Chinese government is constantly revising its plans to meet is 11th five year plan targets.
It just ticks me off when people say "why can't they just DO something" when many millions of people are actually dedicated to doing something about this.

And anyway, no-one responded to my suggestion of how we the public could actually DO something which would have a very REAL and IMMEDIATE effect on our air quality. (see earlier this thread, bottom p3).
Is no-one interested? Everyone too tight to find a few hundred dollars a year? Or am I just completely barking mad for having that idea in the first place!!?

[Sleuth]

I respectfully disagree that they are doing something about the air quality. I will agree that they are talking a good game and even throwing money around; however most money in China doesn't seem to find its way to where it was going.
Everyone who talks about this relates how much worse the air has become over the past 5 years, which would seem to indicate that nothing is really happening.
The air in Shandong is positively toxic; Beijing and Xian have been called the most polluted cities in the world. Last year Beijing issued at least one warning to the entire population not to go outside. We had a PRC resident tell us he remembered birds from when he was a child. You can travel large portions of eastern China and never really see the sun (never mind about THE stars, because you can't see OUR star); like a big curtain has descended from the sky. You also don't see any wildlife or any trees. Truly sad that people have to live in it.
And you are barking mad, but that wsa evident from your impassioned defense of the Chinese government and corporate bosses.

[aussiegal]

Sleuth, I completely agree.

[abdi]

Whereabouts in Hk do you live Sleuth to avoid the worst of it ? We will be in Sandy Bay...............WITH an air purifier I think !! Any news of the air there?

[tinybear]

http://www.epd-asg.gov.hk/

[Sleuth]

Originally Posted by abdi

Whereabouts in Hk do you live Sleuth to avoid the worst of it ? We will be in Sandy Bay...............WITH an air purifier I think !! Any news of the air there?

We live in Fo Tan and what we avoid is the car exhaust (see Tiny Bear's url for "roadside"). There was a study done recently that said you had to be "x" feet away from a busy road to avoid lung damage.
It is hard to avoid whatever pours out of China, but south and east are generally better than north and west. The pollution from China streams down the Pearl River delta because of all the factories located up river. So south and east puts as much land mass as possible between you and the pollution. You'd want to do the same for any HK-based coal fired power plants.
Things become better when the wind shifts to off the ocean.

[Sleuth]

Originally Posted by tinybear

http://www.epd-asg.gov.hk/

Tiny Bear,
That is quite depressing. But the air quality isn't usually that bad all over. If you look at the historical data for the first quarter you'll see that Shatin is the best of the lot (fewest bad hours). I think Fo Tan would be better than Shatin because there is less traffic.