Multi-year emission of carbonaceous aerosols from cooking, fireworks burning, sacrificial incenses, joss paper burning, and barbecue and the key driving forces in China

Abstract. There has been controversy about the air pollutants emitted from sources closely related to people's daily life (such as cooking, fireworks burning, sacrificial incenses and joss paper burning, and barbecue, named as five missing sources, FMS) impacting the outdoor air quality to what extent. Till now, there is no emission estimation of air pollutants from FMS, as the missing of both activity dataset and emission factors. We attempted to combine the questionnaire data, various statistical data, and data of points of interest to obtain a relatively complete set of activity data. The emission factors (EFs) of carbonaceous aerosols were tested in our lab. Then, the emission inventories of carbonaceous aerosol with the high spatial-temporal resolution for FMS were established firstly, and the spatial-variation trend and driving forces were discussed. From 2000 to 2018, organic carbon (OC) increased from 4268 t to 4919 t. The OC emission from FMS was 1.48–2.18 ‰ of its total emission in China. The emissions of black carbon, element carbon (EC), and brown carbon absorption cross-section (ACS_BrC) emissions from FMS were in the ranges of 22.6–43.9 t, 213–324 t, and 14.7–35.6 Gm², respectively. Their emissions tended to concentrate in special periods and areas. The OC emission intensities in central urban areas were 3.85–50.5 times that of rural areas due to the high density of human activities. While the ACS_BrC emissions in rural regions accounted for 63.0–79.5 % of the total emission result from uncontrolled fireworks burning. A mass of fireworks burning led to extremely higher ACS_BrC and EC emissions on Chinese New Year’s eve, as 1444 and 262 times their corresponding yearly average values. Interestingly, significant (p<0.01) correlations between human incomes and pollutant emissions were found, but they were positive (r = 0.94) and negative (r = –0.94) for urban and rural regions, indicating the necessity of regulating human lifestyle and increasing income for urban and rural peoples, respectively.

This study provided the first-hand data for identifying the emissions, variation trends and impacting factors of FMS, which is helpful for modeling works on air quality, climate effect, and human health risks at specific periods or regions and for modifying their emission control policies. The data in this work could be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19999991.v1 (Cheng et al., 2022).