Beijing’s dirty air is easily the worst thing about living there. You might think what to do about it is obvious. Many people do, including this man who wants to sell the expensive air filter he bought: I remember the day IQair Sales Rep Justin Shuttleworth came to my place [in Beijing] to give me a demo. This guy has the easiest job in the world. All he does is come with his little air quality measuring device, show you how bad the air you are breathing is in your apartment (indoor air is sometimes worse than outdoor air for those who don`t know), and as the minutes go by, you literally see the amount of particles in the air go down, until it’s basically nil. This was the first time that I could actually smell the difference. This is from an email list I’m on. I got the same demo.  But it had the opposite effect: It made me not want to buy the IQair filter. The air coming out of the IQair filter was very clean, yes. But there was only so much it could do. More dirty air was always coming into my apartment and no matter how high (= noisy) they ran the machine the overall level of dirt was no more than cut by 2/3rds.

I already had an air filter. The air it produced wasn’t quite as clean as air from the IQair filter but it was still much much cleaner than the intake air. The IQair machine cost about 11,000 RMB. My filter had cost about 1,000 RMB. For 1,500 RMB I could buy a bigger version of what I already had, an air filter that cleaned twice as much air per minute as the IQair machine while producing roughly the same amount of noise. Its output was slightly dirtier than the output of the IQair machine but the overall cleaning effect — the reduction in dirt — was much greater. I ended up getting two of the 1,500 RMB filters. I think of this demo when I hear someone talk about how this or that traditional diets is better than our modern diet. They make a simple point: People who eat the traditional diet are healthy, people who eat the modern diet are unhealthy. Just as the IQair demo guy has “the easiest job in the world.” They inevitably conclude: Eat the traditional diet or at least closer to it.

Just as the conclusion of the demo is supposed to be: Buy an IQair filter. It seems so simple. But it isn’t so simple. Eating the traditional diet isn’t easy, just as the IQair filter isn’t cheap. Maybe their abstraction — their description — of the traditional diet leaves out something important. alen t300 air purifier ukJust as the IQair people do not measure cleaning power per decibel, which turns out to be what matters. oreck proshieldtm plus air purifier reviews(I traded air pollution for noise pollution. ionic pro air purifier envionI wanted the best deal possible.) If you read Good Calories Bad Calories you may remember the Canadian anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson who spent many months with Eskimos eating what they ate.

He came back and told the world “you can eat only meat.” In his conclusions and subsequent field experiment, he ignored the fact that the Eskimos ate a lot of fermented meat. This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 9:24 am and is filed under Beijing, fermented food, food, nutrition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Please select a Smart Air country location: (If you’re not sure, choose either the China (English) or India site.)Compare 2016 time control 110 to 220VAC home or office air purifier china Yueqing Ruihua Cabinet & Whole Set Equipment Co., Ltd. US $31.77-35.77 1 Piece Transaction LevelSaturday night at The Distillery, a small bar tucked away in a warren of narrow lanes in Beijing’s city centre. The place is almost empty – a few people sit at the bar sipping cocktails and moaning about pollution. “It’s a bad smog day so people aren’t coming out,” says Bill Isler, the American bar owner, buffing glasses through boredom.

Conversations in the bar revolve around the smog and the near-constant cloud it causes across the Chinese capital. Stepping out of the bar, the smoky tang of polluted air instantly hits the back of the throat while visually, the haze creates an apocalyptic vibe. China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection’s (MEP) air quality index (AQI), the official measure of harmful pollutants in their air, has averaged over 400 micrograms per cubic metre for most of the day. China has weaker severity classifications for air pollution, but according to the World Health Organisation a measurement over 300 indicates a “severely polluted”atmosphere in which the public is advised to not go outside. The WHO puts the safe level at 25. The city is currently experiencing its worst spell of air pollution of 2015. The environmental and health impacts to China of these high levels of air pollution are well documented, but it has direct impacts on businesses in the country too. In 2013 the MEP issued guidelines for businesses about how to tackle pollution, including suggestions that workers could take annual leave for smog days or work from home, but the measures were not mandatory.

While there are legal limits for work environment factors such as temperature, companies are protected from loss of productivity due to smog by this lack of recognition. Some foreign companies such as Japanese electronics giant Panasonic, meanwhile, offer a ‘“pollution allowance”’ to foreign workers they base in Beijing to tempt them to stay there. The tourism industry is particularly vulnerable, with many believing that news reports about smog-cloaked Chinese cities have contributed to the recent downturn in international tourists visiting the country. “The branding of China is all around the Great Wall and Forbidden City near and inside Beijing, which is now covered in smog,” says Roy Graff, managing director of tourism advisory firm China Contact. “International tourists see that and attribute it to all of China, even though in the west of the country the air is pretty good.” As such, hotels in polluted cities are increasingly marketing themselves towards domestic tourists and international business travellers, who visit China regardless of pollution levels.

Tour companies are acting too. “No tour operator would admit it on record, but I’ve found that many that have focused on China are now selling more trips to south-east Asia to offset the downturn,” says Graff. “They’re diversifying to keep turnover up.” The food and beverage industry is also affected. The marketing team of Mosto, a western-style restaurant in Beijing’s busy Sanlitun shopping area, estimates it has a 30% decrease in walk-in business when the AQI is high. Nearby craft beer bar Jing A, a large venue usually packed with ale-swigging customers, saw trade drop by around 30% in early November during a week of particularly bad smog. However, when pollution peaks and people stay indoors to avoid it, some food delivery services enjoy sales spikes. Dao Jia, a meal delivery company that employs around 3,000 people across 10 Chinese cities, sees business increase by around 15% when the AQI is high. It’s a particularly busy time for them now in Beijing.

“In winter here, the public heating system that uses a lot of coal kicks in, so air pollution is heavier compared to the summer,” says Sun Hao, CEO of the company. “It really helps us with order volume.” Sherpa’s, a smaller meal delivery firm that operates in Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou, reports a sales spike of up to 30% on high pollution days in the capital. Founder Mark Secchia says that the industry has a history of profiting from depressing trends. “In terms of tragedies ironically helping business, one of the main things that really helped Sherpa’s was the SARS outbreak in 2002,” he says. “We quadrupled sales because people didn’t want to leave their houses.” Other food businesses in China are also finding silver linings in having to operate in a smog cloud. Carrefour, the French supermarket chain, recently ran adverts in the Beijing media trumpeting its first green store in the city, featuring an air cleaning system and electric car charging stations.

Staff at Moka Bros, a health-orientated sister restaurant to Mosto, claim it enjoys decent sales during smog days as customers crave healthy food and share photos of their meals on WeChat, China’s hugely popular messaging app. Some actively use pollution as a marketing springboard. Isler, The Distillery bar owner, has air purifiers in his two bars that reduce AQI indoors to around a third of outside levels. When the smog intensifies he sends a message to his bar’s WeChat contacts: “Kill your liver, not your lungs, breathe clean air while you drink.” Juice By Melissa, an organic juice company, sells “signature pollution fighting juices” at a discount when the AQI is over 200. Jing A, meanwhile, serves a suitably bitter “Airpocalypse” beer that gets cheaper on a sliding scale as the AQI increases. “We have eight air purifiers pumping and close all the doors,” says co-founder Kris Li. “It’s not enough to offset the loss smog causes but people do come looking for it.