Non-agricultural ammonia emissions in urban China Non-agricultural ammonia emissions in urban China Non-agricultural ammonia emissions in urban China

Abstract

The non-agricultural ammonia (NH 3) emissions in cities have received little attention but could rival agricultural sources in term of the efficiency in PM formation. The starting point for finding credible solutions is to comprehensively establish a city-specific Non-agricultural Ammonia Emission Inventory (NAEI) and identify the largest sources where 5 efforts can be directed to deliver the largest impact. In this paper, I present a NAEI of 113 national key cities targeted on environmental protection in China in 2010, which for the first time covers NH 3 emissions from pets, infants, smokers, green land, and household products. Results show that totally 210 478 Mg, the NH 3 emissions from traf-fic, fuel combustion, waste disposal, pets, green land, human, and household products 10 are 67 671 Mg, 56 275 Mg, 44 289 Mg, 23 355 Mg, 7509 Mg, 7312 Mg, and 4069 Mg, re-spectively. The NH 3 emission intensity from the municipal districts ranges from 0.08 to 3.13 Mg km −2 yr −1 , with a average of 0.84 Mg km −2 yr −1 . The high NH 3 emission inten-sities in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, Yangtze River Delta region and Pearl River Delta region support the view that non-agricultural NH 3 sources play a key role in city-scale 15 NH 3 emissions and thus have potentially important implications for secondary PM for-mation (ammonium-sulfate-nitrate system) in urban agglomeration of China. Therefore, in addition to current SO 2 and NO x controls, China also needs to allocate more scien-tific, technical, and legal resources on controlling non-agricultural NH 3 emissions in the future.