Do Chinese New Year Fireworks Pollute Indoor Air?

I’ve posted data before showing that outdoor air quality is strongly correlated with indoor particle counts (r = .71), but Chinese New Year gives nerds like me a great chance to see what happens when we get a momentary shock to air quality.

The media made a big deal about people cutting back on fireworks this year out of a concern for air quality, and that may be true, but you can still see a strong spike in PM2.5 as Beijingers rang in the year of the horse:

 

Fireworks Pollution PM2.5 Beijing

 

Not all that surprising. But what’s more interesting is that you can see a corresponding increase in the particle counts in my collaborator Gus’s bedroom (blue line):

 

Chinese New Year Fireworks China Air Pollution IAQ

 

These indoor counts are without a purifier running, so they demonstrate how quickly outdoor air pollution can find its way indoors and how variable indoor air quality can be in a single room over time. Simply put: the worse the air is outside, the worse it is inside.

Yet the glass half empty can also be half full. When outdoor particulate goes down, indoor particulate can go down in a hurry. Check out what happened after the firework apocalypse ended:

 

Spring Festival Fireworks China Air Pollution IAQ

 

A note for fellow nerds: The indoor particle counts are not precisely on the hours, which might exaggerate the apparent time lag between indoor and outdoor counts.


Free Guide to Breathing Safe

Want to learn more about breathing clean air? Join thousands more and stay up to date on protecting your health.

Subscribe
Notify of

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Smart Air low cost purifiers

Smart Air is a social enterprise and certified B-Corp that offers simple, no-nonsense air purifiers and provides free education to protect people from the harms of air pollution. We are proud to be the only certified B-Corp dedicated to fighting air pollution.

Certified B-Corp air purifier company