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Science of the Total Environment 612 (2018) 490491

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Science of the Total Environment

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/scitotenv

Vehicle exhaust: An overstated cause of haze in China


Yi-Bo Zhao, Pan-Pan Gao, Wan-Dong Yang, Hong-Gang Ni
Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Circular Economy, Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University, Shenzhen 518055, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Overall, total exhaust emissions of NOX, VOC and particulate matter (PM) declined, though vehicles in use con-
Received 28 July 2017 tinued to increase in China. This suggested that contribution of motor vehicle exhaust to haze in China may be
Received in revised form 24 August 2017 exaggerated. A higher frequency of haze episodes in China with lower total emissions fraction from vehicle ex-
Accepted 26 August 2017
haust compared with those in the USA conrmed that there exists no strict causality between vehicle and
Available online xxxx
haze. No signicant correlation (p b 0.05) between haze days and the contribution of vehicles to airborne
Editor: D. Barcelo PM2.5 (particulates that are b 2.5 m in aerodynamic diameter) or car ownerships. All results revealed again
that vehicle exhaust is an overstated cause for haze formation in China.
Keywords: 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Haze
China
Vehicle exhaust

The detrimental effects of haze on the human health, both physically control on air quality during the Sino-African Summit 2006 (Cheng et
and psychologically, have been well-documented and widely acknowl- al., 2008).
edged (Huang et al., 2014). There also has been extensive research into Indicators such as specic ratio values, trace ions and elements are
the causes of haze to try to reveal the key factors behind this. The main- usually employed to trace emission sources. However, the main pollu-
stream view is that vehicle exhaust, along with secondary inorganic tion compositions, subject to physical or chemical changes, are derived
aerosol, dust, coal combustion, biomass burning are largely responsible from multiple emission sources. Taking into account the complex com-
for causing haze. Commonly, the haze is characterized by an extremely position of airborne PM (an enormous number of possible chemical spe-
high PM2.5 values (Yang et al., 2015) and PM2.5 should be responsible cies associated with the particles), relying only on the common
for the haze pollution (Zheng et al., 2015). For China, haze has long indicators will lead to deviation of source apportionment results. For in-
been a national concern. Many scholars, and the public as well, believe stance, neglecting VOCs from biomass burning would underestimate
that auto exhaust is a major cause of haze in China (Beijing Municiple secondary organic carbon fraction, especially during the winter (Liu et
Environmental Protection Bureau, 2015; Guangzhou Environmental al., 2014). We can use the similarity index (Zheng et al., 2012) for a ho-
Protection Bureau, 2015; Guo et al., 2014; Huang et al., 2016; Pui et al., listic approach towards source apportionment. This method compares
2014). However, the contributions of vehicle exhaust to haze varies the characteristics of all known and unknown chemicals between the
greatly (4%75.6% for China (Table S1 in Supplementary data) mainly potential sources and the haze episodes. The similarities, covering all in-
measured in urban environment), and such variations are mainly be- formation including physical and chemical changes both in source and
cause of the complexity in the causes of haze. Bearing this in mind, this sink, may reect the contributions of different sources.
article attempts to explore the relationship between haze and vehicle ex- In the US, the vehicle exhaust generally accounts for ~60% for NOX
haust holistically. and ~26% for VOC from 2009 to 2015. In contrast, that of China's were
Determining the sources and causes of haze is difcult because of the only ~30% and ~20%, respectively (Han et al., 2016). However, the total
large number of variables involved in the processes. Often, notable dis- exhaust emissions of NOX, VOC and airborne PM have altogether de-
crepancies can be observed in the results due to the various source ap- clined, although vehicles in use continued to increase in these two coun-
portionment methods used. For example, both local aerosol nucleation tries (Fig. S1). This indicates that the contribution of vehicle exhaust to
and growth and the regional transport of airborne particles contributes air pollution is actually overestimated. In fact, the occurrence of hazes
signicantly to regional haze (Lin et al., 2016). In another circumstance, have reduced signicantly over decades in the US (Hand et al., 2014),
meteorological factors can affect air quality as well. High wind speed ac- even with a higher total exhaust emissions than China. As for China,
tually resulted in the overly optimistic estimation of the effect of trafc the complete opposite has occurred (Tao et al., 2016; Zhang et al.,
2015); that is, a high frequency of haze episodes has occurred even
with a lower total emission from vehicle exhaust than the US. This obser-
Corresponding author. vation further conrms that there is no strict causality exists between ve-
E-mail address: nihg@pkusz.edu.cn (H.-G. Ni). hicle exhaust and haze occurrence.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.08.255
0048-9697/ 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Y.-B. Zhao et al. / Science of the Total Environment 612 (2018) 490491 491

It is important to note that the more stringent emission standards for with this article can be found in the online version, at http://dx.doi.
new vehicles since 1998 has led to a signicant reduction in total emis- org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.08.255.
sion of CO, HC, NOx and PM10 (in which PM2.5 usually dominates (Zhou
et al., 2016)) in China, but the problem of haze continued to intensify
after 2009, slowly but steadily (Tao et al., 2016). To investigate whether References
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Liu, J., Li, J., Zhang, Y., Liu, D., Ding, P., Shen, C., et al., 2014. Source apportionment using
To summary, haze pollution is such a complex problem and it is really radiocarbon and organic tracers for PM2.5 carbonaceous aerosols in Guangzhou,
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Appendix A. Supplementary data
and chemical species of PM2.5/PM10 based on published data in China: potential im-
plications for the revised particulate standard. Chemosphere 144, 518526.
Detailed discussion on the correlations between vehicle exhaust and
haze, and additional gure and tables. Supplementary data associated

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