Festival fireworks on the fifth day after Spring Festival threatened the quality of the environment in many places in China, in line with the folk tradition of greeting wealth with fireworks.
The Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) revealed that the air quality in the capital on Friday and Saturday stayed at a lower level, with the highest Air Pollution Index (API) at 94 in Mentougou district.
According to data from the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center (EMC), the PM10 in the city climbed after 7 pm on Friday, peaking at around 0.26 at 10 pm and had kept the level of above 0.1 until 2 am yesterday.
Du Shaozhong, the deputy chief of the capital's EPB, said on his Sina microblog that setting fireworks has become the primary cause of the high pollution during the first 15 days after the Chinese Lunar New Year's Eve, and the most polluted air in the last lunar year appeared on the first, fifth and 15th days, when people usually celebrate with fireworks.
Peng Bo, a resident in Beijing, told the Global Times that although after fireworks the air was suffocating, the wind blew it away quickly. Therefore neither air quality nor visibility was affected too much.
Wang Jiayi, another resident near Yongfeng town in Hai- dian district in Beijing, told the Global Times that people set fireworks mainly in the morning and at night, and he could smell the sulfur contained in the firecrackers.
The air quality in Shanghai also remained at the second- class level on Friday, but went back to first class Saturday morning, the Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center said yesterday.
The Chongqing EMC revealed that the local quality of air held at second class Friday, while the Nanjing EPB microblog published that the PM10 climbed from some 0.06 early morning Friday, and gradually dropped after lunch time.
However, it soared again with the vast number of fireworks being set off from 11 pm, and reached around 0.55, leaving the air severely polluted.
Both Wang and Peng said that fireworks noise pollution is much more intrusive than smell. "When you want to sleep at night, the noise keeps you up," Peng complained.
Zhu Dake, a cultural critic and professor at Tongji University, said on his Sina blog that the fireworks for greeting wealth is a "ridiculous folk-custom," as the smell and noise can only scare the "fortune god" away, not welcome him.
"It not only wastes money, but also creates pollution and meaningless noise," he wrote.
Wang suggested restrictions on the variety of crackers, and that standards on those that are highly-explosive, extra-noisy, and cause pollution be set.
However, he did not agree with the banning of festival fireworks.
"We have few traditional cultures left now, and fireworks, as one of them, should remain," he said.
