Monitors improve Tianjin air quality

Every working day at 8 am, Zang Cuifeng takes to the streets of Zhujiangli community, in Hexi district, Tianjian, except when it rains heavily. She walks around the community, inspecting every corner and takes photos of every piece of trash or untidiness she sees, using a cellphonelike chengguantong she carries, and sends them to a monitoring headquarters in Hexi district.

The photos are analyzed by monitors and immediately forwarded to monitoring centers of the relevant law-enforcement departments, and within two hours, on most occasions, staff members from those departments go to the site where the photos were taken and try to resolve the problems.

"There is much less pollution recently, and sometimes I do not take even a single photo in a whole day," Zang said. She said that when she took the job as a community inspector for pollution in June, violations such as burning leaves in the open were more common and she used to take at least a dozen photos a day.