I live in Ostrava, some 160 km away. Entire Upper Silesia is a bad place for air quality in winter, it can often be seen on continental maps as a sore red spot.
Fortunately most of the coal burning is gone, but individual people still burn all sorts of shit in their homes. PET bottles etc.
We tend to suffer from "inversions" here, and way back in the coal times, the air quality used to be comparable to London during the Great Smog of 1953. Nowadays it is better, but still quite bad compared to rest of Europe.
In December 2024, I traveled from Ostrava to Warsaw and back via train, so through both Czech and Polish Upper Silesia. The Silesian part of the journey was a pea-souper, like riding through a yellowish cloud. (Warsaw itself had crisp chilly air.)
I used to live in Gdansk, and later Gdynia, and let me tell you - as soon as it's cold outside, people burn all kinds of shit at home, the air's so thick you can practically cut it with a knife. We theorized that the smog's mainly from residential burning of coal, but of course who know's what's in the stove.
All I know, is that it smells really unhealthy, and the smoke coming out of houses is a deep, black colour, almost like oil.
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.
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 or discomfort.
What changed my mind about the whole thing was my kids. I may not feel the particulates in the air, but my kids do, especially my eldest daughter (who has early childhood asthma, in remission) - winter comes, particulates go up, they start coughing uncontrollably all day. Particulates go down, suddenly they're healthy again (+/- running nose).
I have limited sympathy for conspiracy theories, and very little for those burning trash in their homes, but I do understand where the smog-skepticism comes from. I still remember when Krakowski Alarm Smogowy became a thing, winter 2012; back then, this felt like a huge fad pushed by young activists on the Internet.
I got the same condition for diesel fumes since my military service. Thankfully
I remember how dizzy I used to get around fumes but I really have to force myself to avoid fumes now even at the faintest smell since I can endure it ... when people around me start complaining I can't even smell it.
I assume you lived there since childhood and got used to it from that time?
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).
I don't mean this in a bad way but, have you visited other countries? I'm Spanish but lived for about half a year in Krakow, and the difference is just so stark I can't imagine skepticism. In winter the air smells burned. Fog is a phenomenon, sure, but what takes place most of winter in Krakow is not fog. It's just smoke.
I didn't know about any of this when I first travelled there, in fact when my boss at the time recommended I got a mask I thought he was paranoid or something. Absolutely not.
My parents were the same until I forced them to install an air purifier, and showed them the filter after running it for one winter (with windows always closed). It was snow white when new, and turned black after four cold months (not grey or dark grey, but literally black).
Well, the map obviously does a lot of extrapolation. Look at Norway, for example. The bigger cities pollute the air in a 50km radius? In a country where heating is primarily electric? When Berlin and Paris don't seem to affect the air quality 20km away, despite having ten times the population?
To be exact: the problem here is fossil fuel and wood being burned in inefficient furnaces/stoves/fireplaces where the fuel doesn't fully burn. There are efforts by the government to replace them but they aren't super effective yet (random example: https://um.warszawa.pl/kopciuchy).
For the industrial scale fossil fuel furnaces this problem is solved already (they are obviously still bad because of their huge CO2 emissions but that's a different problem).
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).
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!
I know developed countries have a very different understanding of the word "clean", but in my city -- which is stuck in the 18th century -- the difference between winter and summer months is extreme. 500-1000 µg/m³ of PM2.5 in winter is the usual deal. 1500-2000 µg/m³ are not unheard of. Yet in summer it's often only 5-10 µg/m³, with spikes of no more than 50 µg/m³ in the evenings due to -- again -- coal burning.
And we have a lot of traffic, regular traffic jams. The average age of a typical car is older than 10 years, according to government data. Most of them are used cars with 100k miles (or more) on them imported from western Europe or the US.
Still, the difference in particulates in summer vs winter is literally hundreds of times.
Gas-powered cars are indeed much cleaner, they are very popular in Armenia because of favorable pricing compared to petrol. And while air in cities here may not be very clean, it's generally not because of cars: people burn trash in winter and there are a lot of dust in the summer.
Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.
LPG cars are also very popular in Poland, because of fuel prices. Not sure about new cars, but if you buy a used car that hasn't somehow yet been converted to burn LPG, the conversion is pretty much the first thing you do.
Warsaw is top 15, Krakow and Warsaw are the only European cities in the top 15. For some added context, it's around -10 degrees celcius there right now. I don't know why Poland stands out here, but I know that older residential areas burn wood (in other Eastern European countries as well), because that's just how you heat an old house: these neigbourhoods are horrible to walk through in winter, because the air just stinks of smoke.
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? I'd be surprised if people living in Krakow or Warsaw commonly burn trash.
It's people from surrounding areas who are experiencing energy poverty. City buildings typically have either central heating or gas furnaces.
A common sight in my area at this time of the year is a senior person driving up to a community dumpster in an equally old car with plates indicating not being from around here and looking for loose pieces of wood - typically furniture.
The sale of furnaces that would even fit something like this for burning was banned in IIRC 2018, but there's a backlog of still functioning ones that are used.
Anyone trying this in a city would have the authorities called on them, but deep in rural areas few care.
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.
Also one thing to note is that if pollution is bad in general then nearby fires and local sources of pollution will be much more noticeable. At least in my experience it seems to keep the pollution closer to the ground. Like if you are walking around a city with a lot of traffic on a day with bad pollution you will basically smell car exhaust all day whereas on days with low pollution even with the exact same amount of cars it will be much less noticeable.
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.
Since 2019 people living in Krakow do not burn any solids for heating, because the city introduced total ban on solid fuels including coal and wood an the ban is quite effective.
But people around the city and, frankly, in most of Poland still burn solid fuels and if you drive around these places the smell can be really terrible and the smoke color and density coming from some chimneys definitely doesn't look like a dry wood smoke. Such smoke is often a product of burning very low quality, super fine-grained coal or rather coal dust, which is the cheapest fuel available.
The traditional Polish categories of sorting rubbish is „to the burner” and „to the forest”, optionally „to be burned during the day” and „to be burned during the night”.
Fyi a lot of the unrecyclable waste is burned in other countries too (like most plastic types) but it's done in special facilities with proper filters installed
If the somehow-trendy wood-burning stove a friend has recently had installed in the UK is anything to go by — and it was expensive — then "pretty clean" is relative. The air stinks outside his house, and the air stinks inside his house. I don't understand the appeal at all.
I was shocked on a recent trip to England where there was the smell of wood smoke in suburbia.
Fancy is subjective, but I wouldn't call a burner whose air is fed from the inside fancy. Even if you have a good chimney, but your burner interfaces with the inside air, presuming the house is relatively air-tight (built in the last 15 years), you'll get smoke inside when you use it, especially while the chimney is cold, because there won't be enough draft to pull the smoke out of the house. Where I am it is forbidden to have such burners in a new construction.
We just installed a second woodburningstove in our house, https://www.contura.eu/en-gb .. and i mean you can mess up your fire by burning wet wood etc. or... paper i dunno.
But dried wood burns really clean, absolutely no smell INSIDE the house (wtf?!) and outside you see a thin whisp of smoke from the chimney.
I wonder how expensive it would be to get widespread usage of better stoves, heat pumps or co-generation + district heating with centralized gasified burning. Everything could be locally built.
I don't know about electricity prices there either.
Gas for heating is something every European nation should steer clear from, for strategic reasons.
> I wonder how expensive it would be to get widespread usage of better stoves, heat pumps or co-generation + district heating with centralized gasified burning. Everything could be locally built.
Do you want cheap and efficient, or do you want locally built?
Very expensive. If you want to invest, first step would be making inefficient houses efficient, aka insulation. Problem is that, a lot of older housing ventilation is built on it being leaky...
The page only lists 126 cities, with the bottom three having an AQI of 0.
So the editorialized title is incorrect. It's not "top 5 worst air quality worldwide", it's only top 5 in this list, which is a small subset of the world's cities.
It's a Swiss company but even Switzerland's largest city, Zürich, is missing.
China sure as hell has more than 8 cities and Russia more than 2.
Few years ago Kraków has forbidden the use of solid fuels which improved the situation significantly. Days like today are happening much less often since then. Moreover, Kraków has probably one of the densest network of pollution sensors in the world, which is why we talk about it at all. There are places in Poland that are much worse off, but there's not that much data to back it up.
My understanding is that the problem is exacerbated by the shape of surrounding terrain and atmospheric conditions. I.e. the city is in a cavity and on cold days there is a mass of high pressure that pushes all the smog down.
But you are correct I believe (hailing from Wro here) - there have been many countermeasures implemented and cities are packed with sensors. Only so much can be done.
I might be wrong, but I thought the situation in Kraków improved significantly several years ago due to the efforts of local administration, so much that we were jealous here in Warsaw. Has it worsened again since then?
That's just yet another coping mechanism, I believe.
I lived in Krakow in ~2015, and live there now. It's the same. It smells the same, it looks the same, the polution levels are the same, and the number of days like today in a year is the same.
I love Poland, love the people. In many towns though (ie I was in Bielsko-Biała recently) it smells like many things run on coal (like residential heating).
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 better if it got rid of a lot of the heavy diesel traffic in the city. That's slowly happening. But it's not that bad here most of the time.
The point of pollution is that it stinks (literally) and is bad for your health. Pollution kills people, shortens expected life times by years, causes respiratory issues for children, etc. Those are some good reasons to do something about it. There are good alternatives to coal at this point. Mostly this is just inefficient legacy infrastructure that we pay extra for to keep going to "protect jobs". From a macro economic point of view, that stopped making sense quite some time ago. Which is why coal plants are going extinct in a lot of places.
Even gas plants are a big improvement. I think of them as a stop gap solution that might be economically risky long term. Wind, solar, and batteries are cheaper. Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean). However, gas plants are undeniably a pragmatic compromise between cost and polluting. Unlike nuclear they are easy to switch off when not needed and can act as a fallback solution when wind/solar fall short in the winter. LNG is not cheap though and that makes gas plants long term risky as renewables plus batteries marginalizes their use to the point where they are deeply unprofitable.
There's a base load argument that often pops up in these discussions. Gas plants are nice because they can be switched off. Base load is basically the type of power that is expensive to switch off. Mainly coal and nuclear. This is actually problematic in a grid with a lot of intermittent power supply (wind/solar). Dispatchability is more important. Gas power is good because it is rapidly dispatchable. Batteries act as a buffer and minimize the need for gas plants to run.
Baseload doesn't characterize power plants but demand. For PP the relevant terms are firm power/firming and modulation. Firm power is anything from hydro to thermal plants. But modulation capacity and costs are different. Hydro is extremely good in both regards. Nuclear and gas are about on par in terms of modulation speed (depends on models on both sides) but gas is cheaper to use as peaker. On the other hand gas, esp LNG is expensive and will become even more so with CO2 tax increase. Coal is slower to modulate, but very cheap to operate without co2 tax and very expensive with tax enforced. That's why coal is going away- co2 tax is making even lng cheaper than some coal units to run
Ren per unit are cheap but transition will still cost a lot, incl all relevant infra around them. Some countries can afford going faster, like Germany, others will go slower. It's hard to say now how things will pan out due to increasing geopolitical instability which can cause funds reallocation for say military or other sectors
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.
Coal does not magically materialize either, it needs ot be mined, transported, processes and then transported some more. You'd have to account for that in order to make a fair comparison.
You may also want to take into account how localized and preventable the emissions are. In this particular case, burning fossil fules to heat up homes, already implies no expensive filtration systems, because installing them would be a private investement and one that likely makes no sense given they could equally well replace coal furnace with gas one for less the price.
What's more important is Poland has one of the highest electricity prices in Europe. Even accounting the downsides, it totally makes sense to replace the base of the energy mix with nuclear power and leave coal/gas for when there's a shortage of power. At that point moving to electical heating should make the actual, both financial and envioronmental, cost of inevitable emissions more 'efficient' and manageable. So two ghouls with one rod?
Nuclear requires least mining and materials over lifecycle vs any alternative so in this regard it's clean.
It has low land footprint as a bonus point
It outputs comparable or even smaller waste volumes vs alternatives per kwh over lifecycle. Both nuclear and renewables do create toxic waste over lifecycle. For eg ren do use much more copper both internally and for the grid. Copper mining is associated with arsenic and other dangerous chemicals that must be isolated forever, otherwise you get nasty spills like recently in Africa.
To sum it up, yes, nuclear is as clean as any good ren alternative
Lyon, France is occassionally right up there too. If the weather (mostly the wind) is right/wrong we can shoot right up the ranking thanks to the geography of the surrounding region.
I've been living there for 15years and it's the reason I've moved away. Frankly I love the city enough that I would sabotage my health for it. Not my kids health though. Asthma related problems in kids are widespreada and of course bad air quality is related to tons of other negative consequences.
I wonder though how do they compute the number (is it average across points measured in the city?). Because within city borders air quality varies wildly. There are some regions where it is actually pretty good.
I live in Bangkok and we also get inversions during the "cold" (for Thailand haha) season, the same time that farms slash and burn, making this the worst time of year for our air quality as well.
It's much better this year but incredibly hard to police since officials often don't have jurisdiction where the pm2.5 originated, before getting trapped in the inversion
I've been here since 2015 with the pm2.5 getting noticably worse from 2017 onwards. Hard to tie it to any degradation in health. I have air purifiers at home and wear N95 whenever I go out and it's bad. I know there were a few big studies around the prevalence of cancer rates that correlated with the pollution getting worse in China. But I'm not nearly qualified enough to comment on or vet those
The list appears to contain some inconsistencies. For example, Jaipur, India has an AQI of approximately 175, yet it does not appear in the top rankings, despite being larger in both population and geographic size.
IQAir has shit coverage. I live in Kazakhstan in a city at the eastern part of the country, near the border with Chinese Xinjiang, where PM2.5 levels regularly exceed 1000 µg/m³ (that's right, it's not a typo). The highest concentration I've seen this winter is 1900 µg/m³ just a couple of days ago.
SO₂ pollution is also extreme, with levels of 1000 µg/m³ being exceeded on a regular basis, and 5000-8000 µg/m³ not unheard of. Yes, I am sure of these numbers, it's not a typo.
Right at this moment there's some wind and the pollution has somewhat subsided, but it won't last: it's an exception. For example, the average PM2.5 concentration over the last month is around 250 µg/m³, depending on the exact place.
We have extensive network of air sensors, but it's not currently public (it only started working a couple of months ago and is in the process of being made available to the public). I can only recommend looking at https://aqicn.org, which has much better coverage than IQAir, and speaking of our country specifically, it collects data from our old sensors provided by the government.
Disregard anything that looks suspicious (some of the sensors are not working and show zero levels of pollution -- they're simply broken).
My city is the worst one, but actually most Central Asian cities have terrible air quality due to harsh winters and outdated heating methods with zero emission control. Much, much worse than anything in Poland or Europe generally. You won't see them on IQAir because AFAIK they mostly collect data through their own sensors, which are expensive and not used here.
Almaty also has terrible air quality, but looking both at averages and extremes, it's about 3-4 times cleaner than this place.
As I said, it currently looks okay due to some wind, but it's a short abnormality and the first relatively clean "window" for the past ten days. Look at this station's history and you'll see conditions more typical for this region.
Even historical data shows "only" 310 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but this is also misleading. The new network includes 26 more accurate stations spread all over the city, but the public portal for these data is being worked on. Hopefully next time this subject comes up on HN I'll have something to link to.
Several of the nearby stations are simply not working and always show zero.
All I'm trying to say is that using IQAir data to rank anything global is exceedingly misleaing.
6 stations. One from "corporate contributor" named Arek (common Polish first name, short from Arkadiusz so does not look like a big corp) plus 5 other individual contributors.
What equipment those 6 stations have? No idea. Are the instruments calibrated properly? No idea. Are they placed in the right spot, not on the balcony near the chimney? No idea. Are they placed evenly across Krakow to give reliable city-wide data? Looking on the provided locations - not really.
Iqair seems to "crowdsource" their measurements so they get "crowdsourced" data, which can be total crap. Do they even verify those data? How? No idea.
There are many houses in Poland that are using coal heating, and unfortunately a lot of people burn there their thrash. Kraków is surrounded by smaller towns and villages, where single family houses are common. To make things even worse, Kraków is in a basin, which makes the air flow even more difficult. If you add there years of city mismanagement when it comes to air flow, you land in such a situation
"Krakow’s pollution stems from a mix of local and regional sources. A primary culprit is domestic heating, the burning of coal and wood in older, inefficient household boilers and stoves remains widespread in the Małopolska region (1).
Car traffic also adds nitrogen oxides and fine particulates, exacerbated by an ageing vehicle fleet. Topography and meteorology worsen the problem, Krakow sits in a basin-like region prone to temperature inversions and limited ventilation, allowing pollutants to accumulate.
Additionally, emissions drift in from surrounding municipalities and industrial zones, making regional coordination crucial to air quality. Despite a solid-fuel ban in the city since 2019 and the replacement of many coal boilers, compliance is uneven and some residents still use banned fuel."
I think it’s topology (concave) + widespread poor heating methods in the agglomeration + a very bad day + inefficient combustion engines.
I’d maybe include accurate measurements. The government isn’t trying to hide that and doesn’t have the means to, and highly quality sensors are widespread.
Despite government incentives and regulations some people burn garbage in stows. It's a local cultural thing and the state seemingly is powerless to do anything about it despite being the 20th economy in the world.
Freezing to death is even more terrible for their health. It's also much more immediate. And so is being poor.
Breathing dust and smoke is a minor inconvenience in comparison. Any negative health effects will become noticeable in decades if at all. Doesn't help that most of the people responsible likely remember themselves or their parents breathing even worse stuff most their lives, with no ill effect being seen.
Hell, it's one reason I myself considered air quality issues to be overblown - I don't perceive smog. I couldn't tell you whether it's bad or good air day in Kraków - I could only tell you when the air is too clean because I get sore throat then. I no longer consider air quality to be an overblown fad, but that's because I have small children and they start coughing non-stop when the air gets bad.
It's not just poverty, but education about pollution and a common view in the post-communist countries that the common good (clean air in this case) isn't so important. It's the same with things like noise or graffitis for instance.
In Latvia you commonly see rich people with BMW SUVs behaving like this. My friends see no problem with having coal barbecue or very heavy music in the center of Riga.
Out of curiosity, why would you burn your trash, and especially plastics? It smells and is clearly unhealthy and the caloric content is worthless compared to wood.
Several garages near my house have people living in them, and they burn anything that burns -- plastic bottles, pieces of used tires, rags soaked in used motor oil. I'm pissed as hell at them, but the country is already poor, and they have even less.
Old/low quality stoves leak a lot of emissions in the house, but people don't realize it. Also, smoke finds its way back in the house quite easily. Sad that such extreme tragedy of the commons still happens.
I am Polish and I don't see any racism in the previous comment because it was just a statement of the fact (disputable at best). I see some in yours, because you seem to suggest that race is somehow involved in what we are talking about.
LOL, there is nothing racist about it, neither Poland nor Czechia are really into environmental enforcement against individuals, and you can definitely smell it in winter. As of now, "small sources of pollution" (e.g. mostly individual homes) are at least comparable to industry when it comes to releasing bad stuff into the air.
I hate the acrid smell of burning plastic, but no one will do anything about it.
It's the same in Latvia. Riga wants to set up a zero-emissions zone and a toll to enter the city center, but won't ban open stoves or solid fuel burning, which pollutes much more than cars in winter.
Kraków just set up a clean transport zone; it went into full effect just few weeks ago. And people just can't shut up whining about it, even though it doesn't really put much burden on ~anyone. Most people drive petrol-powered cars (usually converted to support LPG, too), and the minimal norms for the clean transport zone are so low, it's hard to find a car that doesn't meet it. You can buy a used petrol-powered car with pocket change and it would already meet the norms.
Those are useful, but not very effective usually as no one controls it after a few months, unless you set up a costly and complex certification and licence-plate monitoring system.
There isn't much wind there at all so the pollution can't escape. I'm not saying this isn't the residents' fault, but it isn't entirely the residents' fault.
I'd suspect just small amount of datapoints with maybe bias for people installing air sensors because that particular area's air quality is bad for whatever reason (near to road, neighbour have old coal boiler etc.)
During covid, when car traffic went to almost 0, the air quality was also extremely bad. Its mostly coal in the houses plus some people are not even using coal in their heating systems
Assuming a large contributing factor is all the coal plants now running to sustain Germany's independence from nuclear? Berlin's air quality has also tanked a lot since the energy crisis started.
But coal and lignite power production in TWh in Germany went down over the last decades? [0] Are you saying Germany is importing form Poland who is using goal power plants?
Why would you jump to this conclusion? I wonder why some people on internet are repeating narratives like drones.
Poland has largest use of coal in EU. Czechia and Germany are behind. Poland is including energy from sun and wind now a lot but there is still long way. Unlike surrounding countries they never had nuclear for some reason.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/live/
Sulfur can counteract warming (although not the carbon dioxide itself obviously). There was a brief period, right before the world stepped back from releasing sulfur into the atmosphere, when our carbon dioxide emissions were completely countered by our sulfur emissions, when it comes to global temperatures only.
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.
I live in Ostrava, some 160 km away. Entire Upper Silesia is a bad place for air quality in winter, it can often be seen on continental maps as a sore red spot.
Fortunately most of the coal burning is gone, but individual people still burn all sorts of shit in their homes. PET bottles etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrava_Basin
We tend to suffer from "inversions" here, and way back in the coal times, the air quality used to be comparable to London during the Great Smog of 1953. Nowadays it is better, but still quite bad compared to rest of Europe.
In December 2024, I traveled from Ostrava to Warsaw and back via train, so through both Czech and Polish Upper Silesia. The Silesian part of the journey was a pea-souper, like riding through a yellowish cloud. (Warsaw itself had crisp chilly air.)
All I know, is that it smells really unhealthy, and the smoke coming out of houses is a deep, black colour, almost like oil.
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...
What changed my mind about the whole thing was my kids. I may not feel the particulates in the air, but my kids do, especially my eldest daughter (who has early childhood asthma, in remission) - winter comes, particulates go up, they start coughing uncontrollably all day. Particulates go down, suddenly they're healthy again (+/- running nose).
I have limited sympathy for conspiracy theories, and very little for those burning trash in their homes, but I do understand where the smog-skepticism comes from. I still remember when Krakowski Alarm Smogowy became a thing, winter 2012; back then, this felt like a huge fad pushed by young activists on the Internet.
I got the same condition for diesel fumes since my military service. Thankfully I remember how dizzy I used to get around fumes but I really have to force myself to avoid fumes now even at the faintest smell since I can endure it ... when people around me start complaining I can't even smell it.
I assume you lived there since childhood and got used to it from that time?
Yes. Born and raised in Kraków, spent maybe 5 years living elsewhere in total.
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).
I didn't know about any of this when I first travelled there, in fact when my boss at the time recommended I got a mask I thought he was paranoid or something. Absolutely not.
But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize fantasy nuclear accidents instead.
For the industrial scale fossil fuel furnaces this problem is solved already (they are obviously still bad because of their huge CO2 emissions but that's a different problem).
(Note: I specifically say for the local. I'm not talking about global CO2 levels here. That's a different topic.)
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.
And we have a lot of traffic, regular traffic jams. The average age of a typical car is older than 10 years, according to government data. Most of them are used cars with 100k miles (or more) on them imported from western Europe or the US.
Still, the difference in particulates in summer vs winter is literally hundreds of times.
Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.
Care to share more about trash burning? I'd be surprised if people living in Krakow or Warsaw commonly burn trash.
A common sight in my area at this time of the year is a senior person driving up to a community dumpster in an equally old car with plates indicating not being from around here and looking for loose pieces of wood - typically furniture.
The sale of furnaces that would even fit something like this for burning was banned in IIRC 2018, but there's a backlog of still functioning ones that are used.
Anyone trying this in a city would have the authorities called on them, but deep in rural areas few care.
It's coming from the surrounding areas, not the city itself.
But people around the city and, frankly, in most of Poland still burn solid fuels and if you drive around these places the smell can be really terrible and the smoke color and density coming from some chimneys definitely doesn't look like a dry wood smoke. Such smoke is often a product of burning very low quality, super fine-grained coal or rather coal dust, which is the cheapest fuel available.
I was shocked on a recent trip to England where there was the smell of wood smoke in suburbia.
We just installed a second woodburningstove in our house, https://www.contura.eu/en-gb .. and i mean you can mess up your fire by burning wet wood etc. or... paper i dunno.
But dried wood burns really clean, absolutely no smell INSIDE the house (wtf?!) and outside you see a thin whisp of smoke from the chimney.
I don't know about electricity prices there either.
Gas for heating is something every European nation should steer clear from, for strategic reasons.
Do you want cheap and efficient, or do you want locally built?
So the editorialized title is incorrect. It's not "top 5 worst air quality worldwide", it's only top 5 in this list, which is a small subset of the world's cities.
It's a Swiss company but even Switzerland's largest city, Zürich, is missing.
China sure as hell has more than 8 cities and Russia more than 2.
But you are correct I believe (hailing from Wro here) - there have been many countermeasures implemented and cities are packed with sensors. Only so much can be done.
That's just yet another coping mechanism, I believe.
I lived in Krakow in ~2015, and live there now. It's the same. It smells the same, it looks the same, the polution levels are the same, and the number of days like today in a year is the same.
[1] https://powietrze.malopolska.pl/aktualnosci/wyniki-pomiarow-...
I’d hazard to guess that part of it is that they accept being on the “don’t over regulate, but grow” path.
The point of pollution is that it stinks (literally) and is bad for your health. Pollution kills people, shortens expected life times by years, causes respiratory issues for children, etc. Those are some good reasons to do something about it. There are good alternatives to coal at this point. Mostly this is just inefficient legacy infrastructure that we pay extra for to keep going to "protect jobs". From a macro economic point of view, that stopped making sense quite some time ago. Which is why coal plants are going extinct in a lot of places.
Even gas plants are a big improvement. I think of them as a stop gap solution that might be economically risky long term. Wind, solar, and batteries are cheaper. Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean). However, gas plants are undeniably a pragmatic compromise between cost and polluting. Unlike nuclear they are easy to switch off when not needed and can act as a fallback solution when wind/solar fall short in the winter. LNG is not cheap though and that makes gas plants long term risky as renewables plus batteries marginalizes their use to the point where they are deeply unprofitable.
There's a base load argument that often pops up in these discussions. Gas plants are nice because they can be switched off. Base load is basically the type of power that is expensive to switch off. Mainly coal and nuclear. This is actually problematic in a grid with a lot of intermittent power supply (wind/solar). Dispatchability is more important. Gas power is good because it is rapidly dispatchable. Batteries act as a buffer and minimize the need for gas plants to run.
Ren per unit are cheap but transition will still cost a lot, incl all relevant infra around them. Some countries can afford going faster, like Germany, others will go slower. It's hard to say now how things will pan out due to increasing geopolitical instability which can cause funds reallocation for say military or other sectors
> 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.
You may also want to take into account how localized and preventable the emissions are. In this particular case, burning fossil fules to heat up homes, already implies no expensive filtration systems, because installing them would be a private investement and one that likely makes no sense given they could equally well replace coal furnace with gas one for less the price.
What's more important is Poland has one of the highest electricity prices in Europe. Even accounting the downsides, it totally makes sense to replace the base of the energy mix with nuclear power and leave coal/gas for when there's a shortage of power. At that point moving to electical heating should make the actual, both financial and envioronmental, cost of inevitable emissions more 'efficient' and manageable. So two ghouls with one rod?
It has low land footprint as a bonus point
It outputs comparable or even smaller waste volumes vs alternatives per kwh over lifecycle. Both nuclear and renewables do create toxic waste over lifecycle. For eg ren do use much more copper both internally and for the grid. Copper mining is associated with arsenic and other dangerous chemicals that must be isolated forever, otherwise you get nasty spills like recently in Africa.
To sum it up, yes, nuclear is as clean as any good ren alternative
I wonder though how do they compute the number (is it average across points measured in the city?). Because within city borders air quality varies wildly. There are some regions where it is actually pretty good.
It's much better this year but incredibly hard to police since officials often don't have jurisdiction where the pm2.5 originated, before getting trapped in the inversion
SO₂ pollution is also extreme, with levels of 1000 µg/m³ being exceeded on a regular basis, and 5000-8000 µg/m³ not unheard of. Yes, I am sure of these numbers, it's not a typo.
Right at this moment there's some wind and the pollution has somewhat subsided, but it won't last: it's an exception. For example, the average PM2.5 concentration over the last month is around 250 µg/m³, depending on the exact place.
We have extensive network of air sensors, but it's not currently public (it only started working a couple of months ago and is in the process of being made available to the public). I can only recommend looking at https://aqicn.org, which has much better coverage than IQAir, and speaking of our country specifically, it collects data from our old sensors provided by the government.
Disregard anything that looks suspicious (some of the sensors are not working and show zero levels of pollution -- they're simply broken).
My city is the worst one, but actually most Central Asian cities have terrible air quality due to harsh winters and outdated heating methods with zero emission control. Much, much worse than anything in Poland or Europe generally. You won't see them on IQAir because AFAIK they mostly collect data through their own sensors, which are expensive and not used here.
https://aqicn.org/station/@517492/
Almaty also has terrible air quality, but looking both at averages and extremes, it's about 3-4 times cleaner than this place.
As I said, it currently looks okay due to some wind, but it's a short abnormality and the first relatively clean "window" for the past ten days. Look at this station's history and you'll see conditions more typical for this region.
Even historical data shows "only" 310 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but this is also misleading. The new network includes 26 more accurate stations spread all over the city, but the public portal for these data is being worked on. Hopefully next time this subject comes up on HN I'll have something to link to.
Several of the nearby stations are simply not working and always show zero.
All I'm trying to say is that using IQAir data to rank anything global is exceedingly misleaing.
Which is interesting, as either air quality does not matter that much or those data are just bogus.
Well, air quality matters probably, so we are left with the data. Let's check what is the origin of this information: https://www.iqair.com/poland/lesser-poland-voivodeship/krako...
6 stations. One from "corporate contributor" named Arek (common Polish first name, short from Arkadiusz so does not look like a big corp) plus 5 other individual contributors.
What equipment those 6 stations have? No idea. Are the instruments calibrated properly? No idea. Are they placed in the right spot, not on the balcony near the chimney? No idea. Are they placed evenly across Krakow to give reliable city-wide data? Looking on the provided locations - not really.
Iqair seems to "crowdsource" their measurements so they get "crowdsourced" data, which can be total crap. Do they even verify those data? How? No idea.
If not IQAir, you can use Windy, WAQI, Airly (founded in Krakow, so lots of sensors here).
I am in Krakow right now and my IKEA sensor is reading 183 µg/m³ when I put it outdoors. On a good day it's normally less than 5.
"Krakow’s pollution stems from a mix of local and regional sources. A primary culprit is domestic heating, the burning of coal and wood in older, inefficient household boilers and stoves remains widespread in the Małopolska region (1).
Car traffic also adds nitrogen oxides and fine particulates, exacerbated by an ageing vehicle fleet. Topography and meteorology worsen the problem, Krakow sits in a basin-like region prone to temperature inversions and limited ventilation, allowing pollutants to accumulate.
Additionally, emissions drift in from surrounding municipalities and industrial zones, making regional coordination crucial to air quality. Despite a solid-fuel ban in the city since 2019 and the replacement of many coal boilers, compliance is uneven and some residents still use banned fuel."
I’d maybe include accurate measurements. The government isn’t trying to hide that and doesn’t have the means to, and highly quality sensors are widespread.
Breathing dust and smoke is a minor inconvenience in comparison. Any negative health effects will become noticeable in decades if at all. Doesn't help that most of the people responsible likely remember themselves or their parents breathing even worse stuff most their lives, with no ill effect being seen.
Hell, it's one reason I myself considered air quality issues to be overblown - I don't perceive smog. I couldn't tell you whether it's bad or good air day in Kraków - I could only tell you when the air is too clean because I get sore throat then. I no longer consider air quality to be an overblown fad, but that's because I have small children and they start coughing non-stop when the air gets bad.
In Latvia you commonly see rich people with BMW SUVs behaving like this. My friends see no problem with having coal barbecue or very heavy music in the center of Riga.
(I'm not from Poland.)
I hate the acrid smell of burning plastic, but no one will do anything about it.
Looks like it clears up quite quickly.
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Poland has largest use of coal in EU. Czechia and Germany are behind. Poland is including energy from sun and wind now a lot but there is still long way. Unlike surrounding countries they never had nuclear for some reason. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/live/
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/finale-daten-fuer-2024...
This is about air quality, not waste on the streets.