BEIJING – Concerns continue to grow over air quality in the Chinese capital a year out from the Olympic Games.
An Australian TV station tested the air quality in Beijing this week using internationally recognised monitoring equipment.
It measured air quality at 1.6 – anything above 1.0 is considered dangerous.
It also found air pollution was 20 times worse than that in Sydney.
Olympic organisers concede that air pollution is one of the biggest challenges remaining for the host city.
At a news conference yesterday — two days before an expected crowd of 10,000, including Olympic dignitaries, gathers in Tiananmen Square to mark the one-year countdown for the Olympics — organisers said they were studying a plan to remove a million cars from the road this month to ease congestion and pollution.
The organising committee’s secretary-general, Wang Wei, said more than 200 measures had been taken or were under way to improve the city’s chronic pollution.
Wang said that while it was important to have blue skies for the Games, what “matters most to us is not our image but the health of all athletes and visitors”.
In a separate announcement, reported by the BBC, a Chinese food company said it would begin raising pigs on hormone-free food so that Olympic athletes could avoid positive doping tests.
Qianxihe Food Group said it was raising the Olympic pigs free of antibiotics and steroids, which are commonly used in China to boost yields, in three secret locations around Beijing.
Wang said Beijing had hosted many big events “and there have been no issues of food safety”.
