Estimate emission factor from straw burning in Hanoi
According to new research results in the journal of Air Quality Atmosphere & Health, Vietnamese and Japanese researchers have estimated the contribution of straw burning to Hanoi's atmosphere.
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Burning straw in Hanoi | Photo: Dantri.
Vietnam is one of the leading rice producing countries in the world. As a result, after each harvest, after each harvest season, rice growing areas in Vietnam often have a large amount of straw left over and often have to be burned in the field without any solution to treat it thoroughly. That's also what many other rice-growing countries in Asia such as Thailand, China, India, Philippines, and etc. have also encountered for many years.
Currently, we all know that burning rice straw in the field will affect air quality because it will emit a large amount of black carbon into the environment, emissions. However, Vietnamese researchers are not possible to quantify the impact of each of those straw burning on air quality, and managers have not been able to have an accurate inventory of the air pollution contribution of straw burning.
The reason is that although so far, there have been many studies on the impact of burning straw, but most of them have certain errors due to dependence on the emission coefficient of foreign countries. Normally, each country has different growing conditions, climate, rice varieties, etc., so the emission coefficients from burning straw are different, so it is difficult to inherit accurate results.
In an effort to find an emission factor from Vietnam's rice straw, Dr. Pham Chau Thuy (Vietnam Academy of Agriculture) and colleagues at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, University of Natural Resources and Environment, Kanazawa University and Nagasaki University in Japan searched for an emission coefficient from burning rice straw of Hanoi.
To do this, they conducted experiments in 14 fields in Gia Lam and Hoai Duc as well as experiments in the laboratory of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (Hanoi Polytechnic University) for the period of 2016–2018 to investigate the wastes generated from burning straw, such as CO, CO2, SO2, NO, NO2, PM2.5 dust, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon compounds (PAHs) in these dust particles.
This is one of the results from the project "Research on building emission coefficients from straw burning activities to apply to emissions inventory and impact assessment on air quality in Hanoi city" (Dr. Pham Chau Thuy is chief of implementation) funded by the NAFOSTED Foundation.
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