Air pollution is bigger killer in China than smoking, says new Greenpeace study
Study of 31 mainland cities finds people more likely to die from PM2.5 than tobacco use - and it didn't even include the worst offending places
Air pollution kills more people than smoking in many cities on the mainland, a new study by Greenpeace and Peking University has found.
Tiny smog-inducing pollutants, known as PM2.5, led to about 257,000 premature deaths across the mainland's 31 municipalities and provincial capitals in 2013, according to the study - an average of about 90 in every 100,000 deaths.
In 12 of the 31 cities, including Shijiazhuang , Nanjing , Tianjin and Chongqing , the mortality rate due to pollution was even worse. In these cities, at least 100 out of every 100,000 deaths were blamed on PM2.5.
Both these figures were higher than the official mortality rate of smoking - recorded in 2012 as about 70 in every 100,000, according to Greenpeace.
And the true scale of the problem could be even worse, because several of China's most polluted cities, including those in Hebei province, were not included in the survey.
INFOGRAPHIC: China's air pollution in 2014
Fang Yuan, a Greenpeace spokesperson, said that despite many public complaints about Beijing's smog problems, many other cities had performed much worse than the capital.