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Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

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Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#81
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was travelling a lot a couple of days ago across the countryside just outside of Krakow, and people are definitely burning plastics and trash, you can smell it even inside your car in the early hours of the morning. It's coming from the surrounding areas, not the city itself.

A bit sad to hear, I expected Krakow suburbs to be better off.

Suburbs may be fine, but beyond them there's a ring of small towns and villages, and I bet most of the pollution is flowing from them down into the city.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#83
I am sceptic of that listing. Normally, the bigger a city, the more waste it would accumulate. So why are almost all cities in China and India, ranked below? Save for two in India. Something is strange with that listing. Also if you do an image search on Google, Krakow is nowhere ugly or dirty. Yes, these images have a bias too, but compare it to the megacities in India. There is just no comparison here.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#84

We got a whiff of that in Berlin a few weeks ago when we got some cold wind from the east. Really noticeably bad air quality when I went outside to enjoy the snow and the cold. When I checked the map, I saw that we are basically getting Poland's pollution blowing our way. Most of the time the winds blow from the west and it's fine. Berlin has a bit of traffic but not a lot of coal plants or industry. It would be bett…

That's completely made-up. And also - nobody "smells" pollution from Poland in Berlin. Even AI would not generate this erroneous claim.

> Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean).

And that's also made up. What is "clean" here? Radioactivity? Also if you refer to carbon cost, you have to calculate in EVERYTHING including mining and transport. So no, it is not clean - that is a lobbyist dream to claim otherwise.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#85

Fossil fuel heating is _extremely_ polluting, and really costing the population months, up to years of their life. But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize fantasy nuclear accidents instead.

It depends what you're burning and how you burn it.

If you're burning gas, you're burning it either at the perfect fuel/air ratio or maybe just a little lean. You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out.

If you're piling up coal in a stove you're getting all sorts of crap out of the chimney, including radioactive dust.

It's one of the reasons that cars have been fitted with catastrophic converters. These remove the CO and HC by reacting it with what little excess oxygen there is in the exhaust stream to turn it into carbon dioxide and water, and at the same time produce massive amounts of nitrogen oxides. It reduces the efficiency by quite a bit but that's okay because it's a tiny effect compared to turning a huge chunk of Africa into a toxic hellscape to mine the palladium and rhodium the catalyst uses.

We'd have incredibly clean cities if we ran vehicles on propane instead of petrol, and in the UK there was a big push to do this about 25-30 years ago. Obviously this got a lot of pushback from the banks and car manufacturers, because it wasn't selling people enough debt. Don't adapt your existing car to run on clean fuel that's mostly burnt as production waste! Sell your dirty polluting petrol car that only gets 38MPG and buy this nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel that gets an incredible 39MPG! And all at only 14.7% APR!

Profit before the environment, as always.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#87

Fossil fuel heating is _extremely_ polluting, and really costing the population months, up to years of their life. But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize fantasy nuclear accidents instead.

Natural gas heating is not the problem in this case, it burns very cleanly with semi-modern heaters. The pollution is from coal, wood, and especially all kinds of trash (plastic, painted cardboard, pieces of various engineering wood products).

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#88

I am sceptic of that listing. Normally, the bigger a city, the more waste it would accumulate. So why are almost all cities in China and India, ranked below? Save for two in India. Something is strange with that listing. Also if you do an image search on Google, Krakow is nowhere ugly or dirty. Yes, these images have a bias too, but compare it to the megacities in India. There is just no comparison here.

The PM2.5 in Krakow is currently 185 µg/m³, the WHO recommended annual average is 5 µg/m³.

This is about air quality, not waste on the streets.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#89
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an interesting coping mechanism (verging on the conspiracy theory) popular on some Polish forums, namely that the abysmal data comes from abundance of sensors combined with them being placed (by whom and why? here's where the conspiracy part kicks in) in the most polluted spots. Here's a debunk by a popular Polish fact checking portal (in Polish): https://demagog.org.pl/analizy_i_raporty/smog-nie-taki-zly-j..…

Until recently, I've been a smog-skeptic; I figured it must be an overblown issue, as regardless of what the digital sensors and pretty graphs say, having spent almost my entire life in Kraków, I never saw it, never felt it. Still don't. Air in Kraków feels perfectly fine to me. And every time I saw someone complain, it was because of "see the PM2.5 PM10 thru the roof omg zomg!", not any actual health-related issues…

I hear you but let me add that what you feel is not necessarily the good indicator.

PM 2.5 does have the potential to trigger asthma & similar stuff but it also causes cancer and heart disease, neither of which can be felt (until it's too late anyway).

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#90
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burning coal and wood wouldn't be that bad. Unfortunately its quite common that people burn their trash

Not sure what your gauge for bad is, but low-temperature burning of coal and wood, which is what you get with cheap wood heaters, produces smoke that is definitely polluting and unhealthy. You can get a wood burner that re-burns well and is very efficient and burns the smoke so completely that you mostly get CO2 and water vapor coming out of the chimney, but they're expensive. Care to share more about trash burning?…

Btw, you can burn plastic just fine in a proper industrial incinerator.
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