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A CHINESE environmental group has launched a smartphone app that tracks and shames polluting factories, highlighting how the country is making environmental data more available and enabling public monitoring of companies that pollute.

The app gives, where available, hourly updates on emissions reported by factories to local authorities and shows the plants as color-coded points on a map, with violators of emissions limits in red. It also gives government air pollution data for areas throughout the country.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection requires about 15,000 factories nationwide to report their air emissions in real time to local environmental officials. Since the beginning of the year, the government has required that data be made public and some provincial governments have started posting it on websites, though it has not been collected in one place until now.

Environmental campaigners say public supervision is key to stopping local officials from allowing polluters to continue to operate because they generate growth.

The app is produced by the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, which said it will allow consumers to quickly search air quality data for 190 cities and check and share real-time monitoring data for surrounding polluters.

It said the real-time monitoring showed that 370 large industrial companies were producing excessive emissions yesterday.

Gu Beibei, senior project manager at IPE, said that in the past air quality data was not so user-friendly. Now, “if the air quality is bad you can switch (to the factory map) and see who is in your neighborhood,” she said.

Wang Yan of New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council said China’s publishing of real-time PM2.5 data and polluters’ monitoring data was unprecedented.

Wang, director of the NRDC’s China Environmental Law Project, said disclosing data helped safeguard its credibility. “When subject to public scrutiny, unreasonable and illogical data can be identified by environmental groups or experts with certain professional knowledge and skills,” she said.