Field-based measurements of major air pollutant emissions from typical porcelain kiln in China

Abstract China has been famous for its porcelains for millennia, and the combustion processes of porcelain production emit substantial amounts of air pollutants, which have not been well understood. This study provided firsthand data of air pollutant emissions from biomass porcelain kilns. The emission factor of PM2.5 was 0.95 ± 1.23 g/kg during the entire combustion cycle, lower than that of biomass burning in residential stoves and coal burning in brick kilns, attributed to the removal effects of the long-distance transport in dragon kilns. The temporal trend of particle pollutants, including particulate matters (PMs) and particulate polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) (low at ignition phase and high at the end) again indicated the removal effects of the special structure, while gaseous pollutants, such as gaseous PAHs, exhibited the opposite result. The GWC100 was estimated as 1.4 × 106 and 0.5 × 106 kg CO2e/yr for the scenarios in which 50% and 100% of the wood was renewable, respectively. The GWC100 of dragon kilns is nearly equal to that of 745 households using wood-fueled stoves. These results indicate the necessity of pollution controls for biomass porcelain kilns to estimate the emission inventory and climate change.