Beijing Aims to Clean Indoor Air Pollution

Beijing’s bad luck with weather and geography compounded the city’s heavy industrial pollution. Olympic organizers are torn between praying for rain or sun—a downpour would disrupt Friday’s gala opening ceremony but could clear out part of the haze settled over the city. International Olympic Committee Chairman Jaques Rogge said Thursday most athletes don’t face any health risks and that China had done “everything feasible and humanly possible to address the situation.”

Just how polluted is Bejing’s air? Worse than L.A. during the 1984 Olympics—or any other Olympic host city, says Wired, after poring over years of international air-pollution data.

So how can Beijing still continue to tout “green” Olympics? Aside from chasing away cars and closing factories, Chinese authorities did spend almost $20 billion on mass transit and to add new renewable energy, which is meant to provide about 20% of the power for Olympic venues. There are also plenty of flashy clean-tech touches around the venues. But the last, best hope might be inside the venues themselves.

That’s the line from Johnson Controls, the Milwaukee-based maker of all sorts of environmental gizmos, and one of many companies hoping to capitalize on China’s big green leap forward. Johnson Controls says it will be greening 123 million square feet inside 18 Olympic venues by installing all sorts of things to regulate air-conditioning, lighting, energy use, and more.

Like the thousands of athletes that descended on the Forbidden City this week, Johnson Controls is clearly hoping the Olympic showcase will lead to more lucrative contracts in the future. Despite, or perhaps because of, its reputation as the new-coal-plant-a-week, dirtiest economy in the world, Johnson Controls expects China to become the world’s biggest market for building controls and fancy environmental equipment.