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...
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
I hate the acrid smell of burning plastic, but no one will do anything about it.
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.
Looks like it clears up quite quickly.
"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 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.)
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 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.
Care to share more about trash burning? I'd be surprised if people living in Krakow or Warsaw commonly burn trash.
It's coming from the surrounding areas, not the city itself.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.