The sales of fireworks, which are an integral part of the Chinese Lunar New Year, were also affected during the holiday with people's rising awareness of environmental protection as many cities had been shrouded in smog for long periods last month.

A fireworks sales store in Bingzou North Road of Taiyuan City in North China's Shanxi province, saw sales drop by 30 percent in the past seven days compared with last year.

Many government institutions and enterprises canceled their budgets for fireworks in response to central government's call for frugality, said Han Ming, a store owner who has run his business for 10 years.

However, electronic fireworks gained popularity.

Statistics from Taobao.com, China's biggest e-commerce website, showed that the sales volume for electronic fireworks in the week before the festival was up by 271.3 percent compared to the same period last year.

The Chinese capital city of Beijing saw the sale of fireworks and the number of people injured due to them fall significantly during this year's Spring Festival holiday.

A total of 313,000 cartons of fireworks were sold from Feb 9, the Lunar New Year's Eve to Feb 14. This is down 45 percent from the 564,000 cartons sold during the same period last year, according to Beijing municipal government statistics on Friday.

Sanitation workers in Beijing have cleared 5,283 metric tons of fireworks refuse during the holiday, dropping by 332 tons from the same period last year, according to official statistics.

Lu Xiaobo, a technician of Nanjing municipal environment monitoring center, said the air quality during the holiday was better than last year.

The average density of PM10 on Thursday evening, the fifth day of the first lunar month, was 186 micrograms per cubic meter in Nanjing, about 70 percent lower than that recorded during the same period last year, according to meteorological data.

The fifth day of the first lunar month is also called "powu" in Chinese, a day for setting off firecrackers to eliminate misfortune for the coming year.

Most of the PM2.5 during the holiday was due to fireworks, which release sulfur dioxide, nitric oxide, smoke and carbon particles after ignition, said Zhu Lizhong, director of the Environmental Pollution Control Institute with the Zhejiang University.

According to Ye Qing, a professor with the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, advocating frugality in society is of practical significance in China as the country still has more than 100 million poor people living in poverty.

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