Bad air in Poland's climatic health resorts
In Poland, climatic health resorts can charge their guests an extra fee -- because of the supposedly good air. Unfortunately, the air in Poland's recreational and ski resorts is often much worse than elsewhere. In the spa town of Szczyrk in Silesia, they are now not allowed to charge at all.
It seems a bit bizarre when you want to relax in a climatic health resort, but you run the risk of getting sick because of bad air. It gets really annoying when you are asked to pay for it. At least the spa town of Szczyrk in Silesia is no longer allowed to hold out its hand. A tourist filed a complaint and was proven right. Now the town is losing about 150,000 euros a year.
But in other ski resorts, too, the air is bad, even to the point of smog. In Rabka-Zdrój, 50 kilometres from Krakow, the situation is particularly serious: the concentration of carcinogenic benzo(a)pyrene there exceeds 900 times the permitted limit. Respiratory diseases are treated in Rabka-Zdrój. Some cities now at least measure the emission of pollutants, but many measuring devices are wisely installed outside the city and the readings are thus manipulated.
But it is not mainly traffic and industry that cause smog. The main polluters are the inhabitants of the cities, most of whom still use all-burner stoves for heating. A lot of household waste, whether plastic, solvents, treated wood, clothes or shoes, is also burnt in these stoves. There are still about 3 million such stoves in the whole of Poland. And this is not going to change any time soon, because about 4.6 million Poles have difficulties to raise enough money for energy anyway, i.e. they cannot pay their bills or live in unheated rooms.
In Poland, 70 percent of energy comes from coal and 10 percent from gas. Meanwhile, the Polish government has also stopped the expansion of all wind power plants. Emissions trading does not help to reduce emissions either, because a large part of the revenue from emissions trading is paid as compensation to companies that have to buy large amounts of emission rights because they pollute the environment too much.
The fact that there are no environmental zones in Poland, and none are planned, does not necessarily help to reduce pollutant emissions in the country. Yet the introduction of driving bans and environmental zones would be a simple and quick way to reduce air pollution. Even if they are only temporary driving bans that are only activated when the air is bad. In this way, the recreation and spa areas could live up to their name in the short term and once again charge a spa tax for clean air.