Currently,China’s national standard GB/T 18801-2022 Air Purifier was officially released and took effect on May 1, 2023, replacing GB/T 18801-2015. In recent years, frequent weather-related issues have sparked intense public discussion and drawn consumers’ attention to air purifiers. The rollout and implementation of the new air-purifier standard will foster healthy competition across the industry, deliver higher-quality products to consumers, and help build a healthy, comfortable indoor living environment.
The industry’s new benchmark
An air purifier is a product that adsorbs, decomposes, or transforms various air pollutants to effectively improve indoor air cleanliness. Indoor pollutants and their sources mainly include radioactive gases, mold, viruses, particulates, renovation residues (off-gassing), and secondhand smoke. Functions such as disinfection and sanitizing, dust reduction and haze removal, and odor elimination have led a growing number of health-conscious consumers to buy in. Data cited in the source indicate that roughly 70% of the world’s air purifiers are manufactured in China, and the country now has more than 200,000 air-purification-related enterprises.
The updating of the air-purifier standard is closely tied to the shift in consumer demand. In recent years, demand is no longer limited to haze purification; consumers also want added functions — removing gaseous pollutants such as formaldehyde and toluene, and microbial pollutants such as bacteria and viruses — and improving air quality and living standards has become the new benchmark of the air-purification industry.
Zhao Shuang, deputy director of the Standards Research Department at the China National Household Electric Appliance Research Institute (CHEARI), said: “The revision of the air-purifier standard is to adapt to changes in consumer demand and the upgrading of new product functions.” With the enablement of smart technology and new purification technologies, air-purifier functions show a diversified, personalized development trend, and test methods for some newly added functions remain to be refined. These changes have promoted the timely revision of the air-purifier standard.
“For enterprises, a standard is the basis and foundation for designing and manufacturing products. If a product has no corresponding specification, that is irresponsible to both the enterprise and the general public,” explained Liu Ning, filter-development product manager at Beijing Smartmi Technology Co., Ltd. (Smartmi). In recent years, purifier makers have designed and developed many new products meeting public needs, and air purifiers based on different working principles — filtration, electrostatic, catalytic, plasma, adsorption, ozone, and composite types — have entered the market. In this context, the 2015 edition of the national air-purifier standard could no longer fully meet existing needs and had to be revised to regulate, guide, and demonstrate.
“As a functional product, the air purifier has always been a key product in the random inspections by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR),” noted Li Yi, director of the Health Appliance Testing Center at CHEARI (Beijing) Testing & Certification Co., Ltd.”In the past two years, the failure rate of air-purifier products in circulation has been relatively high, indicating that the overall safety and performance level of the product still needs improvement.” Li added that the international IEC 63086 series of air-cleaner performance standards now under development also references many of the test methods from the new Chinese standard — proof of the new standard’s advancement worldwide.
Strengthening the guiding role of standards
“Keeping consumers at the center, the new standard continuously strengthens its guiding role. It resolves consumers’ doubts through scientific evaluation methods, and through raised technical requirements enables consumers to buy good products that perform well and last,” said Zhao Shuang. Taking formaldehyde CADR as an example, the new standard stipulates that the definitions of CADR for particulates and for formaldehyde are the same, whereas international standards distinguish the two. Under the new standard, particulate CADR represents indoor air-purification capability when the indoor pollution level is relatively high; the higher the value, the stronger the purifier’s filtration capability against pollution.
From a consumer perspective, four highlights of the new standard deserve attention
Highlight 1 — Emphasis on long-term effectiveness, to stop buyers being misled by high initial performance but short life. The new standard correlates the Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR, for particulates and gaseous pollutants such as formaldehyde) with the Cumulative Clean Mass (CCM). It establishes a correspondence between optimized product design and filter material selection: CADR reflects initial performance, while CCM reflects durability. “The concept of linking CADR and CCM was introduced into the national standard for the first time, making it easier for consumers to identify quality when choosing,” said Chen Laixing.
Highlight 2 — Addressing a social concern: an evaluation method for virus-removal performance. Consumers are especially concerned about whether air purifiers can remove viruses and whether secondary pollution may occur during use. In response, the new standard — based on extensive test-verification data — adds an evaluation method for purifier virus-removal performance.
Highlight 3 — Focusing on market segmentation: evaluating “odor concentration” by a qualitative human-panel (sensory olfactory) method. China has a huge consumer base with markedly differentiated purifier needs. Removing odors — and the secondary odors produced during use — has become a performance metric some consumers care about. However, because odor components are complex and diverse and different people perceive odors differently, it is hard to establish a correspondence between instrument measurements and consumer sensation. Therefore, the new standard adopts the qualitative human-panel olfactory evaluation method to assess both the secondary odors an air purifier produces and its odor-removal capability.
Liu Ning explained that the new standard also adds many specifications closer to national needs — for example, regulating a silent (sleep) mode to protect sleep quality; re-regulating standby power so that high-energy-consumption products can no longer qualify; and adding test methods for allergen-removal performance, automatic-mode purification performance, and wearable air-purifier performance.
