What ails China’s air, water and land

• It will take Beijing 18 years to meet WHO air quality standards 
• Water contaminated by chromium, food chain by heavy metals

Visitors to China will quickly notice its hazy atmosphere, and pronounce the air unhealthy. That’s the obvious. What’s not is the daily belching of choking smoke (some call it “black dragon”) from factories located in remote provinces and near villages whose people have become numb to the problem after complaints yield only inaction.

But environmental journalists, netizens and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have for years fought for better air monitoring and more truthful reporting to the public. Pressure from this group, and social media reporting of their own air-test results, have helped change public policy: the government has recently announced that it would include PM2.5 levels in national air-quality standards. 

Top: Heavy fog in Beijing bodes ill for pollution. File photo: December 2011 Above: Air monitoring equipment being set up in Beijing. The city has started releasing data on PM2.5 (photo credit: Corbis Images)

Particulate matter, or PM, refers to particles in the air, including dust, soot and liquid droplets. Some particles can be seen, like smoke. Others are so tiny they can only be detected with an electron microscope. Particles less than 10 micrometers in diameter (PM10) pose a health concern because they can be inhaled into and accumulate in the respiratory system, according to the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA). Particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5, or about 1/30th the average width of a human hair) are the worst.

Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, wrote in Global People magazine that Beijing has started releasing data on PM2.5. It has identified the main sources of PM2.5 and presented eight proposals, including phasing out old vehicles, reducing coal burning by 62% in ten years, barring new highly-polluting industries and making officials drive their cars one day less a week.

“Under this plan, the concentration of PM2.5 in Beijing’s atmosphere is expected to drop to 50 micrograms per cubic metre by 2020 (the 2010 annual average was 70 to 80 micrograms per cubic metre according to official sources). By 2030, the figure is targeted to fall to 35 micrograms per cubic metre, meeting new national standards that are to be issued soon.

“Thirty-five micrograms per cubic metre is only just within levels accepted under World Health Organisation (WHO) standards and is much higher than pollution levels in many western cities. And even this will take us 18 years to achieve,” says Ma.

Workers pour neutralisers into a water tank at a hydropower station in Liuzhou City in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. This was done to counter cadmium contamination in the Longjiang River, due to effluents released by a mining company. The incident in January this year triggered panic buying of bottled water (photo credit: Corbis Images)

Water pollution

In a country that suffers from water shortage, it is ironic that this critical resource is at risk from rogue manufacturers who dump chemical effluents indiscriminately, especially into rivers that feed water treatment plants. For instance, last year, a factory in south-west China dumped 5,000 tonnes of toxic chromium tailings on a hilly outcrop in Yuezhou town, polluting rivers and killing fish and livestock. Millions of people were placed in danger of poisoning. Investigations showed it was not an isolated incident.

China is the world’s largest producer of chromium tailings, an effluent from chemical processes. The heavy metal is used mainly in electroplating, drug manufacture and textile dyes. The China Environmental Bulletin said by the end of 2010, there were about one million tonnes of chromium slag stored in 12 provinces across China. 

China started cleaning up the chromium industry in the 1990s and by 2005, only 25 factories were operating. The government ordered leftover tailings to be safely dealt with by 2010. This was obviously not done as many waste contractors still take the easy way out. Bloggers have written about “cancer villages” where many villagers suffered strange diseases, including cancer.

The problem of chromium pollution was immortalised in the movie Erin Brockovich, based on actual events in 1993 in California.

Contamination of food chain

China has struggled with the problem of food-supply pollution for many years, no thanks to widespread mining that released heavy metals like cadmium, arsenic and mercury into the water and air. These toxins are easily absorbed by food crops.

One-tenth of China’s rice yield may carry harmful levels of cadmium, award-winning journalist Gong Jing recently wrote. Cadmium accumulates in the liver and kidneys, and the body cannot expel it naturally. Through prolonged accumulation, the body will suffer from “skeletal changes”, manifested in the pain one suffers when walking.

Fisherman Zhang Jinping looks at dead fishes in the Minjiang River in Shuikou township of Gutian County in Fujian Province in this picture dated September 3rd 2011. It is not known how the fish died but the rotting fish polluted the river which is the main drinking water resource of the province (photo credit: Corbis Images)

In April 2008, a research team bought 63 samples of rice from markets in provinces including Jiangxi, Hunan and Guangdong – and 60% contained more cadmium than allowed. 

Chen Tongbin, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, reportedly said heavy-metal pollution is more common in the south of China, and affects large tracts in parts of Hunan, Jiangxi, Yunnan and Guangxi. Chen estimates than one-tenth of China’s arable land is polluted by heavy metals.

Going by this,120,000 sq km of China’s total 1.2 million sq km of arable land is contaminated with pollutants like cadmium and arsenic.