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Author: Admin | 2025-04-27
Exposure to volatile organic compounds from decaying rubbish, polluted indoor air was responsible for a significant fraction of the sickness and diseases attributed to environmental causes in ancient times.The Chinese kang is an ancient technology developed approximately 2500 years ago during the Zhou Dynasty (722–481 BC). It is an integrated home system for cooking, sleeping, and domestic heating that is still widely used today. A recent large-scale study found kangs in nearly 85% of rural homes in northern China where it is mostly cold and dry and the heating season is long, but the use of this contraption is spread across the country. Similar heating systems were also developed and adopted by other cultures such as the ondol (heated floor) in Korea and hypocaust in ancient Rome. Although the design varies slightly from region to region, the so-called grounded kang was the most widely used in China. There are two main drawbacks with grounded kangs: the burning efficiency (approximately 14%–18% for the body and 8%–10% for the stove) is low, which causes significant fuel waste, and high levels of pollutants are released into the indoor air, especially when the stove and the kang body are put together in the same room. Furthermore, grounded kangs with bad ventilation design often results in smoke backflow and flue choking. In rural China, exposure to indoor air pollution due to the biomass combustion in kangs is associated with a number of morbidities such as acute respiratory infections, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, and
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