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Drones Target Polluters in One of Europe’s Smoggiest Places

Drones Target Polluters in One of Europe’s Smoggiest Places

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Marek Witkowski’s patrol car comes to a halt in a cloud of dust. Within minutes, he’s powered up his four-rotor drone and sent it into battle against the scourge of his country.

The Krakow officer is on the front line of a clean-air revolution in one of the most polluted cities in the most polluted country in the European Union. The cameras check chimneys from above for signs that household furnaces are illegally burning coal or trash.

“That smoke is white, so they’re using gas—it’s OK,” Witkowski says as he steers his drone into a plume emanating from a smokestack 50 meters (164 feet) away. “Let’s move on.”

Drones Target Polluters in One of Europe’s Smoggiest Places

Tackling climate change has become a top political priority in Europe. Green parties are now part of Austria’s governing coalition and inching up on power in Germany. Poland, though, has a mountain to climb. It’s home to more than 30 of the EU’s 50 most polluted cities, a legacy of communist-era industry. Almost 80% of its electricity is generated by coal, which is also the primary fuel for household heating. Preserving jobs for miners is government policy.

Krakow, the country’s historic capital and its most popular tourist destination, took a radical approach to fighting the smog. Buses are all-electric, but more remarkably the city is the first in Poland to issue a ban on burning coal and is policing its air with drones. The law went into effect on Sept. 1.

Depending on household income, the local government subsidizes at least 50% of the cost of new gas-burning furnaces and contributes to energy bills, part of the city’s broader 1.2 billion-zloty ($315 million) antipollution effort paid for by a mix of money from the EU, local taxation, and government programs.

Four months into the purge, the residents of Poland’s second-largest city have fallen into line, according to the local police. On an outing with Witkowski on a recent day in December, there were no illegal sources of home heating detected.

“The most drastic cases of burning toxic materials have become pretty rare,” says Marek Aniol, a spokesman for the Municipal Police Department, which employs 30 air inspectors. “People have noticed the difference in the air quality and want more—more green areas, more efficient recycling, more electric public transport, more healthy solutions.”

Located in a valley near the country’s still-fuming coal and steel industries, Krakow has a population of almost 800,000, with an additional 700,000 or so people living in the metropolitan area. The city made headlines during communism for the acid rain that literally washed away the faces of statues lining its old town.

Poland’s economic transformation, along with the implementation of EU environmental rules, has helped clean up the rain, though Krakow has for decades remained one of the continent’s worst cities for air quality.

The Polish government, which has been at odds with the EU over many things, wants to protect mining jobs, and insists it will reach emission targets at its own pace regardless of more stringent regulations. (The EU introduced its so-called green deal in December.) So Krakow decided to turn into a pioneer of cleaner air, an oasis within the fumes near Poland’s southern border with the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Drones Target Polluters in One of Europe’s Smoggiest Places

The result was a drive led by municipal authorities and activists to replace all archaic home furnaces used to burn wood, tires, plastic, shoes, trash, and other debris to stay warm in the winter. A decade ago, the department investigated about 30 cases of pollution from heating. After acquiring its first drone in 2018, Krakow cited 13,000 households for illegal burning.

“The air knows no borders,” says Jacek Majchrowski, mayor of the city since 2002. “It appeared to many as an insurmountable problem.”

The effort was a reboot of a program from the 1980s, when the city was blighted by emissions from coal burned for heating and for electricity generation. There was also a Soviet-era steel plant in Nowa Huta, a utopian socialist suburb for the workers who would industrialize Krakow, the traditional center of the Polish bourgeois intelligentsia. It’s now owned by ArcelorMittal, the world’s biggest steel producer, and must comply with EU regulations.

Local activists enjoyed a rare success during communist times, prompting the city to put up an information board laying bare the details on air quality for the public and forcing the closure of some coal-heating plants, says Rafal Serafin, president of Krakow-based Polish Environmental Partnership Foundation, and former mayor Krzysztof Gorlich, who’s worked since 1980 to clean up the historic city. But over the decades, as the population assumed the fight was over, interest waned.

This time it’s paying off, says Pawel Scigalski, the mayor’s point man for environmental controls. His office is littered with the graphics, statistics, and news stories on air pollution that make up his typical workday.

“We’ve shown that it can be done,” he says, booting up a computer graphic showing Krakow, highlighted in green, nestled in an angry, blood-red swath of high pollution. “Other regions want to follow us, learn from our experience, and use our know-how. So we’ve paved the way.”

Drones Target Polluters in One of Europe’s Smoggiest Places

That seems a long shot for now in the area around Krakow. The surrounding districts still cough out fumes from what the EU calls obsolete furnaces that burn everything from coal to wood to trash. They’re to blame for almost three-quarters of particulate-matter pollution in the area. The bitter scent of burning coal is noticeable in many smaller towns and villages. It means Krakow’s success is limited by the dirty air surrounding it, Scigalski says.

Twenty kilometers outside Krakow, Zbigniew Lustyk’s sprawling villa sits in the middle of a tree-lined estate. He was drawn to the property a decade ago because of the fresh air. That turned out to be a mistake.

Now, in a living room with views of a wide garden terrace, he runs an air purifier to reduce the respiratory suffering of his family. Like others in the neighborhood, he’s not eligible for the subsidies offered to residents inside the Krakow city limits, and the central government still appears unwilling to throw much money at the problem, he says.

Drones Target Polluters in One of Europe’s Smoggiest Places

Sociologist Anna Kapusta, who works in Krakow but lives 30 minutes away in the village of Wolowiec, is taking the financial plunge to swap out her coal furnace for a gas-fired boiler, a rarity among villagers. But still, completion of that project will be too late for this winter, when it would be needed the most.

Until the work is done, she has to make regular trips down to her cramped and soot-stained basement to feed fist-size black coal into the furnace with an old hand shovel. She only hopes the constant smell of burning coal that permeates Wolowiec will be a thing of the past as locals become more aware and as more financial aid is made available.

“The process is unstoppable and will gain speed,” she said. “Once those old furnaces are in a minority, people will give in under the pressure. I can’t wait to have my village as it should be: a healthy breath.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rodney Jefferson at r.jefferson@bloomberg.net

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