First Beijing indoor/outdoor air pollution results - Air Quality Cam

Beijing Particle Levels

First Beijing indoor/outdoor air pollution results

I am truely exited. We completed our first 12 hours of air quality sampling in Beijing (Saturday, August 2, 8 AM until 8 PM). These are the results:

Outdoors
PM 10: 26 micrograms per cubic meter (Âµg/m3)
PM 2.5: 5 micrograms per cubic meter (Âµg/m3)
PC 0.3: 100′000 particles per liter (p/l) - 2′830′000 particles per cubic foot (p/cf)

Indoors
PM 10: 14 micrograms per cubic meter (Âµg/m3)
PM 2.5: 10 micrograms per cubic meter (Âµg/m3)
PC 0.3: 135′000 particles per liter (p/l) - 3′821′000 particles per cubic foot p/cf

What does it all mean?
As Beijing’s blue sky indicated, we had a clean day in Beijing. PM2.5 and PM10 levels were well within WHO guidelines. The real interesting part of this first day was that indoor air in Beijing can be more polluted than outdoor air. Why? Settled dust on floors and furniture can easily become airborne as we move about. Furniture and cloths shed fibers and more dust. We as occupants shed thousands of skin flakes, which in in turn become fodder for house dust mite that pollute our homes with allergic mite excrement. I can’t wait to get our filtration experiment going. Clean Air Apartment is going to showcase just how healthy an indoor environment can be anywhere in the world.

This entry was written by Frank Hammes. It was posted on August 3, 2008 at 11:23 am.
Frank Hammes is inventor, visionary and President of IQAir, a Swiss-based research and manufacturing company for indoor air quality products. He designed all of the air cleaning systems used by US athletes during the Beijing Olympic Games and he designed the air cleaning solutions that are utilized on CleanAirApartment.com projects. Frank is considered by many Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) experts to be the leading authority on ultra-high efficiency air cleaning.

Beijing Weblog
archive
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- 96% less PM10 and PM2.5 air in Beijing (Clean Air Apartment)! Aug 10, 2008
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- Where is all the dust? Aug 9, 2008
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Introduction
We started the CleanAirApartment.com project while we were in Beijing, China for the 2008 Olympic Games. Beijing is a city known around the world for its air pollution problem, and we were there to work with the U.S. Olympic Committee on "Operation Clean Air" - a first-of-a-kind project to outfit US athlete residential and training facilities with ultra-high efficiency air cleaning.

We knew we would be living in Beijing ourselves during this project, and we thought it would be really interesting to see just what levels of air cleaning we could get in our own apartment.

We installed advanced air purification and wired the apartment indoors and outdoors with sophisticated air quality monitoring so that people worldwide could observe our progress. We were surprised ourselves when our measurements showed up to 99% improvement when compared to the outdoor air.

Going Global
Now we are taking Clean Air Apartment global and will be adding different homes around the world to prove the concept that advanced air purification can help create healthy living environments no matter where you live. The air cleaning systems used will vary from home to home depending on different aspects of the homes' designs. They will be a mix of existing and new technologies, depending on what is needed to create the healthiest possible indoor environment.

What the Measurements Mean
For our air quality tests we currently use laser-based particle counters. Our data is based on three times daily collections, between 8 AM and 8 PM.

All three measurements (PM10, PM2.5 and PC0.3) refer to airborne particles. PM 10 refers to particle mass (total weight) of suspended particles less than 10 microns in size. It is heavily biased toward large dust. PM 2.5 refers to the particle mass (total weight) of suspended particles less than 2.5 microns in size. It is a better indicator for particles that are actually harmful to human health. PC 0.3 refers to the total number of airborne particles (particle count) 0.3 microns in size. It is one of the best indicators for harmful fine and ultra-fine particles generated by automobiles and industry.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) guideline for PM 10 is 50 µg/m3, 24 hours mean and 20 µg/m3, annual mean. The WHO guideline for PM 2.5 is 25 µg/m3, 24 hours mean and 10 µg/m3, annual mean. There are currently no official health standards for PC 0.3. However, many air quality experts agree that particle count is a better indicator of air quality than PM 10 or PM 2.5, because small particles that contribute little to particle mass are the most dangerous in terms human health.