Coatings World - May 2011

What is the Chinese
government doing about
pollution?

Until recently, the Chinese government has turned a blind eye to their pollution problem. Following the issuance of the World Bank Report, which said 20 of the most polluted cities in the world were located in China, a follow up report sponsored by the Chinese Government uncovered potentially scary information and was edited to “prevent social unrest.” The quality of air in Chinese cities is increasingly tainted by coal-burning power plants, grit from construction sites and exhaust from millions of new cars squeezing onto crowded roads, according to the government study. Other newly released figures show a jump in industrial accidents and an epidemic of pollution in waterways.

The report’s most unexpected findings pointed to an increase in inhalable particulates in cities like Beijing, where officials have struggled to improve air quality by shutting down noxious factories and tightening auto emission standards. Despite such efforts, including an ambitious program aimed at reducing the use of coal for home heating, the average concentration of particulates in the capital’s air violated the World Health Organization’s standards more than 80 percent of the time during the last quarter of 2008. Although some improvement has been achieved the air quality is still felt to be at unsafe levels.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Environmental Protection told the official China Daily newspaper, “China is still facing a grave situation in fighting pollution.” The ministry spokesman went on to say that the number of accidents fouling the air and water doubled during the first half of 2010, with an average of 10 each month. The report also found that more than a quarter of the country’s rivers, lakes and streams are too contaminated to be used for drinking water. Acid rain, it added, has become a problem in nearly 200 of the 440 cities it monitored. Over the past year the state media have provided a grim sampling of China’s environmental woes, including a pipeline explosion that dumped thou-

sands of gallons of oil into the Yellow
Sea, reports of a copper mine whose
toxic effluent killed tons of fish in Fujian
Province, and revelations that dozens of
children were poisoned by lead from il-
legal gold production in Yunnan
Province. Chinese officials themselves es-
timate “ 50 percent of the water should
not be drunk, and between a third and a
quarter of that should not be used for
anything,” even industrial uses. Still, the
polluted water continues to be used, con-
taminating soil, preventing crops from
growing and poisoning the public. The
Ministry of Water Resources in China
has said, “Seven-hundred million people
drink contaminated water every day, and
100 million people drink water that’s so
contaminated it makes people sick.”
During the past few months the state
media reported on thousands of residents
in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Re-
gion who clashed with the police as they
protested unregulated emissions from a
local aluminum plant.

A spokesman for the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing said many of the government’s efforts to curtail pollution had been offset by the number of construction projects that spit dust into the air and the surge in private car ownership. In Beijing, driving restrictions that removed a fifth of private cars from roads each weekday have been offset by 250,000 new cars that hit the city streets in the first four months of 2010. Many of the most polluting industries were forced to relocate far from the capital before the 2008 Summer Olympics, but today the wind often carries their emissions hundreds of miles back into Beijing.

In a recent interview, Environment Minister Zhou Shengxian said, “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humanity and nature has never been as serious as it is today.” He went on to say, “If China means to quadruple the size of its economy over 20 years without more damage, it has to become more efficient in resource use.” Otherwise, he said there will be a painful price to pay.

Some say, especially its citizens, that China is already paying that painful price.

Shengxian’s comments came ahead of China’s annual session of parliament, which opened on March 5. They also came a day after Premier Wen Jiabao said China was lowering its annual economic growth target from 7. 5 to 7 percent, in part because of its impact on the environment. In recent decades, development has been prioritized over the environment, meaning that China now has some of the most polluted skies and waterways in the world. It is a situation that will take decades of extensive work to rectify.

In an effort to start doing something productive about stemming the current air, water and land pollution new rules have taken effect in China that restrict car purchases in an effort to combat serious traffic and pollution problems in the capital Beijing. City authorities will allow only 240,000 vehicles to be registered for 2011—one-third of 2010s total. As a result, during the close of 2010 car buyers were swamping dealers in anticipation of the new rules, which will still leave about five million cars on the road in the capital.

Traffic and air pollution in Beijing is among the worst in the world. Beijing officials are trying to balance the desire of a growing middle class to have the convenience and status of car ownership, with a huge congestion problem. Officials said the new rules that will be invoked would not solve the full extent of the city’s problems, only slow down the rate at which they are worsening. Car registrations will be allocated by a license plate lottery system. Under the new rules, government departments will not be allowed to increase the size of their fleets for five years. About 750,000 new cars appeared on Beijing’s streets in 2010, raising the total of registered vehicles for the city to 4. 8 million. China overtook the U.S. as the world’s biggest car and van market in 2009, with 13. 6 million vehicles sold within the country. Will these new rules reverse that achievement? Only time will tell.