Lahore, Pakistan: For the past few months Hasan Zaidi’s phone has been ringing nonstop with calls from desperate residents in Pakistan hoping to get their hands on his newly invented air purifier as smog blankets the country.
“Some days, I had so many calls that I couldn’t answer,” says Zaidi during a recent interview with AFP in his workshop.
Tired of choking on putrid air, Zaidi spent six months perfecting his homemade device as he looked for a low-cost solution to battle the increasingly toxic scourge overwhelming Pakistan.
During this winter alone the 31-year-old engineer has already sold some 500 units, which are priced at just 16,000 Pakistani rupees ($103), but admits to refusing hundreds of orders in recent weeks due to lack of manpower and resources.
In cash-strapped Pakistan Zaidi’s “Indoor Forest” purifiers are cheaper than imported models, which typically cost about two to five times more.
“Now it is less of a luxury and more of a necessity,” explains Sadia Khan, whose company Autosoft Dynamics recently acquired a dozen of Zaidi’s purifiers so his 180 employees can “breathe safely.”
In the past five years, air pollution has worsened in Pakistan, as a mixture of low-grade diesel fumes, smoke from seasonal crop burn off, and colder winter temperatures coalesce into stagnant clouds of smog.
In 2015, 135,000 Pakistanis died due to poor air quality, according to a study published in the scientific journal The Lancet.
Pollution tends to be at its worst in the country’s eastern province of Punjab during winter, particularly in the 12-million strong city of Lahore near the border with India.
In November schools were closed for several days across the province with the level of PM2.5 — tiny particles that get into the bloodstream and vital organs — repeatedly exceeding 200 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
The World Health Organization’s recommended safe daily maximum is a measurement of 25.
Pakistan is ranked one of the worst countries in the world for air quality and Lahore consistently ranked in the top 10 most smog-hit cities, according to the pollution monitoring site AirVisual.
But Tanveer Waraich, director general of the Punjab’s environmental agency, dismisses those figures, saying pollution readings cited by monitors and activists are not from “authentic machines.”
“To say that Pakistan and Lahore are among the top polluted cities... this statement is not based on facts,” he says, but concedes the country’s air quality is largely unacceptable.
Public awareness about the issue is growing due to increased activism on social media about the dangers of pollution and the dire challenges climate change is bringing to Pakistan.
Yann Boquillod, who co-founded AirVisual, said subscribers to the site from Pakistan have increased tenfold this year.
“In Pakistan, there was a problem but no one knew about it. Pakistanis are (now) mobilizing,” Boquillod says.
With officials slow to act, ordinary Pakistanis have increasingly taken measures into their own hands.
In 2016, Abid Omar launched the website PakistanAirQuality (PAQ) dedicated to compiling data about air pollution in the country and publishing its findings.
According to PAQ, Lahore only experienced “10 hours” of good quality air based on WHO standards during the first eleven months of 2019.
Conversely, air quality in the city oscillated between “bad” and “hazardous” for a total of 223 days so far this year.
The smog “has made our lives miserable,” laments a pedestrian in Lahore buying a mask.
Pressure on officials is building.
Ahmad Rafay Alam, one of the few environmental lawyers in Pakistan, filed a suit against the Punjab provincial government on behalf of his daughter and two other teenagers in November, saying officials having underreported the problem.
Outside of activism and lawsuits, others are trying to minimize their exposure to the harmful toxins in the air.
“Last year, it was just bizarre how everybody seemed not concerned,” says Ayza Omar, director of interiorsource.pk, a site offering high-quality face masks and other anti-smog products.
“This year, it has been crazy. We were sold out within the first two months,” she adds, saying they sold thousands of masks this year compared to dozens last year.
In an attempt to improve the situation in Lahore, a group of environmentalists are planning to unveil an eight-meter-high air purifier in attempt to remove harmful particles from the air.
Maryam Saeed, one of the designers, says of the device: “It will help to ease the problem, but it won’t change the whole picture.”
With purifiers and lawsuits, Pakistanis fight back against smog
https://arab.news/g7wuz
With purifiers and lawsuits, Pakistanis fight back against smog
- Pollution tends to be at its worst in the country's 12-million strong city of Lahore during winters
- Public awareness about the issue is growing due to increased activism on social media
In rural Sindh, a woman-led business finds a low-cost answer to tomato price swings
- The company turns tomatoes into powder using a manual, sun-drying process that cuts production costs
- It seeks partnerships with major food brands to expand beyond rural markets, tap into large urban centers
MIRPURKHAS: A small but fast-growing woman-led food company in southern Pakistan is using a simple, low-cost production method to turn tomatoes into powder, a product its founder says could cut costs for major food companies by as much as 50 percent while helping stabilize prices for consumers.
The business operates without electricity-driven drying machines, relying instead on manual labor and natural sunlight to dry tomatoes during periods of oversupply, when prices collapse and farmers are forced to discard produce.
The company, Red Royal Foods (RRF), is based in Jhuddo village in Sindh’s Mirpurkhas district and produces organic powder from ripe tomatoes that are sliced by hand, sun-dried over several days and treated with sea salt, without the use of artificial preservatives, additives or machines.
Founded and led by 24-year-old Zainab Munawar, RRF has grown from a small local operation into a supplier serving markets in Mirpurkhas and Hyderabad. Munawar now aims to sell her product to large local and international food brands operating in Pakistan’s major cities.
“Our target is to do business with National and Shan [Foods],” Munawar, nicknamed Nainsukh, told Arab News while standing inside her factory, which she recently acquired from a wedding lawn owner.
“We also target to collaborate with the brands on an international level like McDonald’s and Kababjees which are very much in demand right now in Pakistan,” she added.
McDonald’s is a major US multinational fast-food chain, while Kababjees is a Pakistani restaurant brand that has expanded beyond traditional barbecue into fried chicken and pizza.
Food manufacturers in Pakistan have been under pressure from rising input costs, driven by higher energy prices, climate-related disruptions to agricultural supply chains and inflation. Corporate taxes can also reach 40 percent, further squeezing margins for those in the business.
Munawar, who holds a master’s degree in medical physics, said RRF’s appeal lies in its ability to sharply reduce production costs by eliminating electricity and heavy machinery from the drying process.
“Ours is a manual technique in which you don’t have to add the electricity and machinery costs and that’s why the rates we offer are 50 percent cheaper than the market,” she added.
Tomatoes, a staple ingredient in Pakistani cooking and food processing, have become a symbol of food inflation in recent years, with prices swinging sharply between periods of glut and shortage.
“We have a time when tomato sales are very high like currently. We are receiving tomatoes at Rs7 per kilogram as these are high in supply and people are even throwing them,” she explained. “We buy tomatoes these days, make powder out of it and preserve it.”
When supplies tighten, prices can soar.
“Then there is a time when tomatoes go short in supply and are retailed at a price as high as Rs400 per kilogram,” she said.
“We then sell our tomato powder at the same price,” she added, referring to Rs100 per 80-gram packet.
For consumers, the powder has become a practical hedge against price volatility.
Inflation stood at 6.1 percent in November, with core inflation described by the State Bank of Pakistan as “relatively sticky.”
Ganga, a 45-year-old RRF worker who lives with her brothers, said the product has changed how households cope with seasonal shortages.
“In the off season, the tomato prices become so high that you can’t even buy a kilogram of it,” she said.
“Then we buy a packet of this tomato powder for Rs100 which lasts for four to five days.”
RRF’s production process is deliberately simple. Tomatoes are sliced by hand, dried in open spaces under the sun for four to six days depending on sunlight intensity and then ground using basic household-type machines.
The initiative received support after the devastating floods of 2022, which destroyed crops and livelihoods across southern Sindh.
Mahdi Hassan, a livelihood officer at the Sindh Rural Support Organization (SRSO), said RRF was backed through post-flood recovery programs implemented with Germany’s Malteser International.
“After the floods of 2022, there was a lot of destruction in Jhuddo because of which people’s livelihoods were greatly affected,” he said, adding that SRSO had supported around 24 similar initiatives in the area, mostly led by women, with about Rs30 million ($107,000) in funding.
Beyond livelihoods, RRF is also trying to reduce Pakistan’s reliance on imported food products.
“No company is producing this dried-tomato powder in Pakistan yet,” said Ahsan Khan, the company’s technical supervisor.
“What is available in the market is being imported ... We are trying to manufacture this dried tomato powder locally and give competitive rates to our buyers.”
During peak seasons, RRF sells up to four tons of tomato powder per month. Munawar said she expects that volume to rise, noting that entry into Karachi’s large food market could significantly boost revenues from last year’s Rs650,000 ($2,319).
“Last year we were in collaboration with Al-Noor Foods while now we have sent requests [business proposals] to National Foods and Shan Foods, who will become our customers after approving those requests,” she said.
RRF has also sent proposals to international brands such as McDonald’s.
“We would be targeting to double, triple our revenues this year if we get approvals from these brands,” she added.
