A Chinese environmental organization says it has created a new smartphone app that can monitor intensities of air pollution, allowing the "naming and shaming" of the factories or power plants producing it.
The software produces hourly emission updates and provides map locations for the polluting offenders based on reports made to local environmental authorities by plant workers, says the app's developer, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing.
Any factory exceeding emission limits shows up on the map as a red dot, allowing users to identify polluting plants and factories in their regions.
The app covers 190 Chinese cities, where up to 370 factories may be violating emissions standards the Environment Ministry of China has set, the institute said.
The ministry requires around 15,000 factories in the country to provide real-time reports of their emissions data.
China's Communist Party has spent years pushing full-throttle economic development while giving little attention to concerns of the environmental impacts, but mounting pressure from residents of the country's smog-bedeviled cities has pushed the pollution issue to the forefront.
Some provincial governments have a begun posting emission data of local factories on websites, but the smartphone app is the first effort to collect and display all such information in one place, its developers said.
Its aim is to make available data on air quality user-friendly, said Gu Beibei, senior manager of the institute's app project.
"If the air quality is bad you can switch (to the factory map) and see who is in your neighborhood," she said. "It will be a very effective tool for people to voice out their concerns."
China's newfound willingness to publish polluters' real-time monitoring data is unprecedented, says Wang Yan of the Natural Resources Defense Council based in New York.
The data is more credible when publicly disclosed, she said.
"When subject to public scrutiny, unreasonable and illogical data can be identified by environmental groups or experts with certain professional knowledge and skills," she said.
The launch of the smartphone app comes a month after the Chinese government changed its environmental protection laws to give activist groups more power to identify companies whose emissions exceed newly established limits.
The new laws will place no limits on the size of fines that could be levied against polluters.
Expected to take effect at the beginning of 2015, the amendments are the first to the country's environmental rules and regulations in 25 years.
