I live in Ostrava, some 160 km away. Entire Upper Silesia is a bad place for air quality in winter, it can often be seen on continental maps as a sore red spot.
Fortunately most of the coal burning is gone, but individual people still burn all sorts of shit in their homes. PET bottles etc.
All I know, is that it smells really unhealthy, and the smoke coming out of houses is a deep, black colour, almost like oil.
The biggest enemy of a Pole is always their neighbor. One may suffocate in their own fumes, but what's important is that this loser next door dies as well.
Jokes aside, this sounds terrible. What are the policies in place to prevent this?
Here's a debunk by a popular Polish fact checking portal (in Polish): https://demagog.org.pl/analizy_i_raporty/smog-nie-taki-zly-j...
What changed my mind about the whole thing was my kids. I may not feel the particulates in the air, but my kids do, especially my eldest daughter (who has early childhood asthma, in remission) - winter comes, particulates go up, they start coughing uncontrollably all day. Particulates go down, suddenly they're healthy again (+/- running nose).
I have limited sympathy for conspiracy theories, and very little for those burning trash in their homes, but I do understand where the smog-skepticism comes from. I still remember when Krakowski Alarm Smogowy became a thing, winter 2012; back then, this felt like a huge fad pushed by young activists on the Internet.
But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize fantasy nuclear accidents instead.
If you're burning gas, you're burning it either at the perfect fuel/air ratio or maybe just a little lean. You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out.
If you're piling up coal in a stove you're getting all sorts of crap out of the chimney, including radioactive dust.
It's one of the reasons that cars have been fitted with catastrophic converters. These remove the CO and HC by reacting it with what little excess oxygen there is in the exhaust stream to turn it into carbon dioxide and water, and at the same time produce massive amounts of nitrogen oxides. It reduces the efficiency by quite a bit but that's okay because it's a tiny effect compared to turning a huge chunk of Africa into a toxic hellscape to mine the palladium and rhodium the catalyst uses.
We'd have incredibly clean cities if we ran vehicles on propane instead of petrol, and in the UK there was a big push to do this about 25-30 years ago. Obviously this got a lot of pushback from the banks and car manufacturers, because it wasn't selling people enough debt. Don't adapt your existing car to run on clean fuel that's mostly burnt as production waste! Sell your dirty polluting petrol car that only gets 38MPG and buy this nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel that gets an incredible 39MPG! And all at only 14.7% APR!
Profit before the environment, as always.
And we have a lot of traffic, regular traffic jams. The average age of a typical car is older than 10 years, according to government data. Most of them are used cars with 100k miles (or more) on them imported from western Europe or the US.
Still, the difference in particulates in summer vs winter is literally hundreds of times.
Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.
Nice one. Anyway three-way catalytic converters also convert NOx to N2 and O2. It would be quite bad if they wouldn't.
> You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out.
No, you still get small amounts of the bad (acutely toxic) stuff too. This point is important - whether it's home cooking on gas, gas heating or ICEs running on unicorn farts, there will still be byproducts from imperfect burning. The only real way out is to turn off the fire.
For the industrial scale fossil fuel furnaces this problem is solved already (they are obviously still bad because of their huge CO2 emissions but that's a different problem).
(Note: I specifically say for the local. I'm not talking about global CO2 levels here. That's a different topic.)
Care to share more about trash burning? I'd be surprised if people living in Krakow or Warsaw commonly burn trash.
Which is interesting, as either air quality does not matter that much or those data are just bogus.
Well, air quality matters probably, so we are left with the data. Let's check what is the origin of this information: https://www.iqair.com/poland/lesser-poland-voivodeship/krako...
6 stations. One from "corporate contributor" named Arek (common Polish first name, short from Arkadiusz so does not look like a big corp) plus 5 other individual contributors.
What equipment those 6 stations have? No idea. Are the instruments calibrated properly? No idea. Are they placed in the right spot, not on the balcony near the chimney? No idea. Are they placed evenly across Krakow to give reliable city-wide data? Looking on the provided locations - not really.
Iqair seems to "crowdsource" their measurements so they get "crowdsourced" data, which can be total crap. Do they even verify those data? How? No idea.
If not IQAir, you can use Windy, WAQI, Airly (founded in Krakow, so lots of sensors here).
I am in Krakow right now and my IKEA sensor is reading 183 µg/m³ when I put it outdoors. On a good day it's normally less than 5.
So the editorialized title is incorrect. It's not "top 5 worst air quality worldwide", it's only top 5 in this list, which is a small subset of the world's cities.
It's a Swiss company but even Switzerland's largest city, Zürich, is missing.
China sure as hell has more than 8 cities and Russia more than 2.
But you are correct I believe (hailing from Wro here) - there have been many countermeasures implemented and cities are packed with sensors. Only so much can be done.
That's just yet another coping mechanism, I believe.
I lived in Krakow in ~2015, and live there now. It's the same. It smells the same, it looks the same, the polution levels are the same, and the number of days like today in a year is the same.
[1] https://powietrze.malopolska.pl/aktualnosci/wyniki-pomiarow-...
I wonder though how do they compute the number (is it average across points measured in the city?). Because within city borders air quality varies wildly. There are some regions where it is actually pretty good.
The point of pollution is that it stinks (literally) and is bad for your health. Pollution kills people, shortens expected life times by years, causes respiratory issues for children, etc. Those are some good reasons to do something about it. There are good alternatives to coal at this point. Mostly this is just inefficient legacy infrastructure that we pay extra for to keep going to "protect jobs". From a macro economic point of view, that stopped making sense quite some time ago. Which is why coal plants are going extinct in a lot of places.
Even gas plants are a big improvement. I think of them as a stop gap solution that might be economically risky long term. Wind, solar, and batteries are cheaper. Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean). However, gas plants are undeniably a pragmatic compromise between cost and polluting. Unlike nuclear they are easy to switch off when not needed and can act as a fallback solution when wind/solar fall short in the winter. LNG is not cheap though and that makes gas plants long term risky as renewables plus batteries marginalizes their use to the point where they are deeply unprofitable.
There's a base load argument that often pops up in these discussions. Gas plants are nice because they can be switched off. Base load is basically the type of power that is expensive to switch off. Mainly coal and nuclear. This is actually problematic in a grid with a lot of intermittent power supply (wind/solar). Dispatchability is more important. Gas power is good because it is rapidly dispatchable. Batteries act as a buffer and minimize the need for gas plants to run.
Ren per unit are cheap but transition will still cost a lot, incl all relevant infra around them. Some countries can afford going faster, like Germany, others will go slower. It's hard to say now how things will pan out due to increasing geopolitical instability which can cause funds reallocation for say military or other sectors
> Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean).
And that's also made up. What is "clean" here? Radioactivity? Also if you refer to carbon cost, you have to calculate in EVERYTHING including mining and transport. So no, it is not clean - that is a lobbyist dream to claim otherwise.
You may also want to take into account how localized and preventable the emissions are. In this particular case, burning fossil fules to heat up homes, already implies no expensive filtration systems, because installing them would be a private investement and one that likely makes no sense given they could equally well replace coal furnace with gas one for less the price.
What's more important is Poland has one of the highest electricity prices in Europe. Even accounting the downsides, it totally makes sense to replace the base of the energy mix with nuclear power and leave coal/gas for when there's a shortage of power. At that point moving to electical heating should make the actual, both financial and envioronmental, cost of inevitable emissions more 'efficient' and manageable. So two ghouls with one rod?
It has low land footprint as a bonus point
It outputs comparable or even smaller waste volumes vs alternatives per kwh over lifecycle. Both nuclear and renewables do create toxic waste over lifecycle. For eg ren do use much more copper both internally and for the grid. Copper mining is associated with arsenic and other dangerous chemicals that must be isolated forever, otherwise you get nasty spills like recently in Africa.
To sum it up, yes, nuclear is as clean as any good ren alternative
The common argument is that people use bad furnaces or burn bad fuel or trash out of poverty, but far too often the actual cause is mentality and not financial issues.
Smog kills around 40,000 Polish people each year. [1] It was reported in 2025 to be 20 times more than in car accidents. [2]
On the bright side, industrial and post-apo art fans can wear breathing masks in Poland without even pretending.
[1] https://pulsmedycyny.pl/medycyna/choroby-ukladu-oddechowego/...
[2] https://www.infor.pl/prawo/nowosci-prawne/6826105,umiera-od-...
SO₂ pollution is also extreme, with levels of 1000 µg/m³ being exceeded on a regular basis, and 5000-8000 µg/m³ not unheard of. Yes, I am sure of these numbers, it's not a typo.
Right at this moment there's some wind and the pollution has somewhat subsided, but it won't last: it's an exception. For example, the average PM2.5 concentration over the last month is around 250 µg/m³, depending on the exact place.
We have extensive network of air sensors, but it's not currently public (it only started working a couple of months ago and is in the process of being made available to the public). I can only recommend looking at https://aqicn.org, which has much better coverage than IQAir, and speaking of our country specifically, it collects data from our old sensors provided by the government.
Disregard anything that looks suspicious (some of the sensors are not working and show zero levels of pollution -- they're simply broken).
My city is the worst one, but actually most Central Asian cities have terrible air quality due to harsh winters and outdated heating methods with zero emission control. Much, much worse than anything in Poland or Europe generally. You won't see them on IQAir because AFAIK they mostly collect data through their own sensors, which are expensive and not used here.
https://aqicn.org/station/@517492/
Almaty also has terrible air quality, but looking both at averages and extremes, it's about 3-4 times cleaner than this place.
As I said, it currently looks okay due to some wind, but it's a short abnormality and the first relatively clean "window" for the past ten days. Look at this station's history and you'll see conditions more typical for this region.
Even historical data shows "only" 310 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but this is also misleading. The new network includes 26 more accurate stations spread all over the city, but the public portal for these data is being worked on. Hopefully next time this subject comes up on HN I'll have something to link to.
Several of the nearby stations are simply not working and always show zero.
All I'm trying to say is that using IQAir data to rank anything global is exceedingly misleaing.
It's much better this year but incredibly hard to police since officials often don't have jurisdiction where the pm2.5 originated, before getting trapped in the inversion
However, I regularly see a lot of Balkan cities hitting the top 10. Sarajevo was #1 quite a few times. Not sure whether it's really worse than Delhi or Beijing, but sometimes it's really really bad. Like, if you imagine the most smoky bar you ever visited, where you see nothing but the cigarette smoke and can't breath. That's how you feel on the street.
I’d hazard to guess that part of it is that they accept being on the “don’t over regulate, but grow” path.
"Krakow’s pollution stems from a mix of local and regional sources. A primary culprit is domestic heating, the burning of coal and wood in older, inefficient household boilers and stoves remains widespread in the Małopolska region (1).
Car traffic also adds nitrogen oxides and fine particulates, exacerbated by an ageing vehicle fleet. Topography and meteorology worsen the problem, Krakow sits in a basin-like region prone to temperature inversions and limited ventilation, allowing pollutants to accumulate.
Additionally, emissions drift in from surrounding municipalities and industrial zones, making regional coordination crucial to air quality. Despite a solid-fuel ban in the city since 2019 and the replacement of many coal boilers, compliance is uneven and some residents still use banned fuel."
I’d maybe include accurate measurements. The government isn’t trying to hide that and doesn’t have the means to, and highly quality sensors are widespread.
Looks like it clears up quite quickly.
Poland has largest use of coal in EU. Czechia and Germany are behind. Poland is including energy from sun and wind now a lot but there is still long way. Unlike surrounding countries they never had nuclear for some reason. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/live/
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/finale-daten-fuer-2024...
This is about air quality, not waste on the streets.
