Beijing (CNN) The first thing Jiang Wang does when she wakes up in the morning is check on her daughter to make sure she's breathing clean air.

Next, it's time to start making breakfast. She's already made sure all the groceries come from an organic farm.

She'll wash her produce with tap water filtered through a separate treatment system under her sink.

But that water isn't for drinking -- there's imported bottled water for that.

This is how Wang typically starts her day, trying to minimize the effects of the toxic environment in Beijing.

"From the moment you open your eyes till the moment, you rest in the evening," she says, "you have to pay really (close) attention, to the air, to the water, to the food you eat."

Jiang Wang, her husband Ludovic Bodin and her two daughters, 6-year-old Mia and 3-month-old Anna.

Wang and her family are part of a growing number of Beijingers who are trying to pollution-proof their lives.

And money is no cost.

It's "very expensive," she says. "But think about the health. There is nothing to trade off."

But for Beijing's rising middle class and poorer residents, this high-end home equipment is financially out of reach.

That's turning pollution into both a health issue and a class issue -- and it's killing off those left behind.

Research by Nanjing University's School of the Environment has linked smog with nearly one-third of all deaths in China, positioning it on a par with smoking as a threat to public health.

Published in November last year, the study analyzed over 3 million deaths across 74 cities throughout China in 2013. The findings revealed that as many as 31.8% of all recorded deaths could be linked to pollution, with major cities in Hebei, the province that encircles Beijing, ranked among the worst.

"Air pollution exacerbates inequality between the rich and poor in urban China," Matthew Kahn, a professor of economics at the University of Southern California, told CNN in an email.

"The rich live in cleaner parts of the city and on more polluted days they can drive to work, work inside, access better doctors, have second homes in the countryside and have expensive and effective air filters."

Beijing risks becoming a tale of two cities, a place where the rich and poor don't even breathe the same air.

It adds up

The Wang family recently installed a fresh air filtering system, which cost them about $4,300.

It works like a ventilation system, cleaning outside air and pumping it into their home.

They also have an air purifier in each room, eight in all, to filter out carbon dioxide and take care of any dirty air that may leak in. Those add up to about $7,200.

And the purifiers need to be changed about once a month -- which rings in at $430.

Water filters for sinks run about $300 and shower filters can cost upwards of $1,000 on JD, a popular Chinese e-commerce site.

For the super wealthy, companies such as Environment Assured, an indoor air quality and water filtration consultancy, will assess the toxicity of living and office spaces.

The company offers a top-of-the-line package that comes in at just under $15,000, according to Alex Cukor, the vice president of enterprise solutions at Environment Assured.

Real estate prices can swing based on technology and proximity to pollution, too.

A two-bedroom apartment in Beijing's MOMA complex -- where the units come equipped with air filtration systems -- cost far in excess of $3 million, according to the Lianjia real estate listings.

That's almost six times the cost of a similarly-sized apartment on the city's dusty fringes.

And these costs aren't reserved to homes.