China's New Air Purifier Standards Set to Filter Out Low-Quality Products

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China is pushing forward with the formulation of new standards for the air purifier industry to help regulate the market, local media is reporting (in Chinese).

The new standards, being developing by the National Technical Committee on Household Electric Appliances of Standardization Administration, will be launched next year. The standards, an update to last year’s version which focused on overall aspects such as energy efficiency, have set clear-cut requirements for core components and parts used on air purifiers, specifying filters’ purification capacity and service life.

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China’s air purification industry has been gaining momentum since 2013, as health-conscious consumers look for air filters to fend off air pollution. Lured by explosive market growth, air purifier firms have ballooned in the country since then. And the market has been teeming with a plethora of low-quality products while there is no lack of quality ones.

Against such a backdrop, the government has urged the rollout of a series of industry standards to rectify the market chaos.

The number of air purifier brands had nearly quadrupled to 546 before falling to 400-some in seven months after the rollout of the industry standards in March 2016 (in Chinese). And there has been indeed some improvement in product quality, but not enough. 75.4 percent of air purifiers were found qualified among 61 batches of products from 56 brands, according to a spot check at the end of last year by the country’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection, and Quarantine (AQSIQ).

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The new standards, to be introduced later this year, are set to raise the technical bar for air purifier manufacturers in the country and eliminate those with inferior quality products or lacking technological innovation.

As many as 5.74 million air purifiers were sold throughout China last year (in Chinese), with sales up 23.6 percent year-on-year. And the sales are estimated at RMB 100 billion this year , with a compound annual growth rate of 30-35 percent in the next few years, according to the Chinese Academy of Industrial and Economic Research.

Photo: images.says.com