In partnership with the non-profit Breathe Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar residents share their concerns about improved coal and agree to try a new pollution solution based on insulation and electric heat.
Breathe Mongolia – Clean Coalition nonprofit is implementing the “Let’s take action!” project, whose main goal is to reduce the number of smoke-emitting chimneys in Ulaanbaatar and increase citizen engagement in accessing, collecting, and communicating air quality data, thus providing tools to take action against air pollution issues.
The “Let’s Take Action!” project aims to reduce children’s chronic carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate air pollution (PM2.5) exposure, namely through the Cooking, Heating and Insulation Products (CHIP) package, which updates gers with improved insulation, electric heaters, and ventilation system Breathe Mongolia is paying half the expense ($500) for installing these upgrades, while the participating families pay the rest.
We successfully recruited 25 families in the Bayanzurkh district to participate in the project. The families were selected because they understood the significance of air pollution health effects and expressed their interest in receiving the CHIP package. When we visited the selected households and asked them to share their concerns related to air pollution, almost all families expressed their dissatisfaction with coal briquette.
“We worry that improved fuel might cause poisoning.”
This was the biggest concern among participating families.
According to the President of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, D. Regdel (reference), “Improved fuel has two times more calories than raw coal, which means that it will combust completely using twice the amount of oxygen. For example, if 100 liters of oxygen were used to burn a bag of Baganuur coal, approximately 200 liters of oxygen would burn the same amount of improved fuel. Therefore, the air circulation in the stove should be at least twice better. However, incomplete combustion will occur if there is not enough oxygen, and toxic carbon monoxide gas will be released. Therefore, if the released gas is not extracted smoothly through the blocked chimney, it will spread in the house to poison.”
Therefore, it is necessary to sweep the chimney regularly to prevent toxic gas poisoning. It seems that participant families clean and sweep their chimneys every other day. Some families reported that they did not burn coal briquette at the beginning of its introduction out of fear of getting poisoned due to CO leaks, and sometimes they kept their stove cold without burning the fuel.
“We do not believe that the use of improved fuel led to a reduction in air pollution in the last two years. It was just because families burned less as the average weather was warm, and eventually, city smoke was not too bad.”
This interesting perspective was shared by some of the families involved in the project. When coal briquette was used, the winter cold in 2020-2021 was 1-3°C warmer than the average. Although this does seem to support the above hypothesis, we are not clear how the amount of fuel used by households will change as temperature rises by a degree.
“Opening the stove when the fuel is burning causes a sore throat, while raw coal does not.”
The above issue was the next concern with coal briquette. O. Soyol-Erdene, a participating citizen, shared that coal briquette is easy to blow here and there due to its crumbly soot and many artificial ingredients. She went on to say that the ash from coal briquette cannot be reused, so it has to be thrown away, whereas we used ash from raw coal to fertilize trees. Also, putting the ashes into bags is difficult as it burns quickly, and the trash truck workers do not take them away if we put them into the metal trash can. It seems complicated to find a solution for handling ashes from coal briquette. Some families spread their coal ashes on the road to prevent them from slipping in the winter, but on windy days those ashes will blow around the city and will affect the respiratory system of the people. As coal ash contains many types of heavy metals, it can cause respiratory problems, brain damage, and cancer in the human body.
In winter, coal ash accounts for 75.2% of household waste in the Ger neighborhood and 48.2% of total trash in Ulaanbaatar. Therefore, at least 347.5 thousand tons of ash are buried in the landfill every year.
Internationally, coal combustion residuals are commonly reused as fill for abandoned mines, as a layer on roads, as an agricultural soil additive, and as an ingredient in concrete and school running tracks. However, even though the experimental activities of recycling ashes from coal briquettes as additives of road layers and road edging curbs are conducted in our country, families are not informed about these initiatives. Moreover, the activity was carried out only temporarily within the framework of the joint project of the Office of the Mayor of Ulaanbaatar and the Health and Social Policy Institute of Mongolia NGO. As a result of this initiative, the new ash reuse standard MNS 6927:2021 was approved, which ensured the legal framework for producing ash products by individuals and entities.
It became clear during our project that the problem of coal briquette continues to bring us new problems one after another. Mongolians tried to solve one problem but ended up creating new ones. Probably the best solution would be to stop burning coal and cease fossil fuel burning stove use, as one of our project participants remarked, “That’s why we requested to purchase a CHIP package.”Our ‘Let’s take action’ project also focuses on this issue and supports the aspiration of families to refrain from using fossil fuel stoves as much as possible.
Visit www.breathemongolia.org to check your daily air quality and take practical steps to protect your health and reduce emissions. Contact us at hello@breathemongolia.org for more information and collaboration opportunities.
Edited by Enkhuun Byambadorj
