Thousands of anti-pollution protesters in Shifang, Sichuan province, battled police in late June and succeeded in halting the construction of a CNY10.4 billion molybdenum-copper alloy plant by Shanghai-listed Sichuan Hongda. Police used tear gas to disperse the crowds after protesters lobbed bricks at government offices. Several protesters were arrested but later released. “The local government will definitely carry out supervision during the entire process of constructing the project. If the company fails in the environmental protection assessment, the local government would not allow it to go into production,” Xu Guangyong, Mayor of Shifang, told protesters. He later agreed to scrap the project. “Given the fact that some people are worried about the environmental impact and health hazards of the project and reacted fiercely, [we] have decided to stop construction on the plant and it will never be built in Shifang,” the city’s Communist Party Secretary, Li Chengjin, said in a statement. Ma Jun, Director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said the case showed the lack of public participation in environmental decision-making. “Heavy metal projects are always highly polluting. Of course the public has concerns about this,” he said. Greenpeace campaigner Ma Tianjie said a toxic arsenic compound contained in the plant’s solid waste posed a major health risk. Molybdenum, though not carcinogenic, can cause liver and kidney damage, and can also hamper bone development in children, while copper is extremely toxic to aquatic animals but less dangerous to people. “The public’s concerns were not unfounded, given the poor environmental record of the metal-smelting industry,” Ma said. Li Yanfang, Environmental Law Professor, says China’s environmental laws still have loopholes in terms of public consultation. As a result, environmental reviews sometimes fail to reflect the public’s true opinion about certain industrial projects. Shifang, with a population of around 430,000, is about 50 kilometers from Chengdu, the provincial capital. Nearly 6,000 people in Shifang lost their lives in the massive 2008 earthquake that hit Sichuan and neighboring areas.

Nearly three years after plans to build an incinerator in Guangzhou’s Panyu district triggered massive protests, authorities have invited tenders to build the plant in a different part of the district. According to an urban solid-waste-management plan for 2010 to 2020, the district government has proposed that the waste incinerator be operating by 2014 in Dagang town, at the southern end of Panyu. The plant was originally planned for the northern end of the district. Two other towns – Dongchong and Dashi – were listed as backup options. Guangzhou’s main landfill in Xingfeng county is overflowing and faces imminent closure. In 2009, Panyu officials announced a plan to build the incinerator in Dashi, which borders Haizhu district, but in November of that year the proposal faced intense opposition from nearby residents. More than 10,000 signatures were collected, and hundreds of angry property owners, concerned about their health and the negative effects on real estate prices, took to the streets. The proposed incinerator in Panyu is designed to process 2,500 tons of solid waste a day, and the capacity is expected to be raised to 2,900 tons by 2020 and 4,000 tons by 2030. According to figures from 2010, Beijing and Shanghai each produced about 20,000 tons of rubbish a day. Central Guangzhou was generating at least 8,000 tons a day, with 7,000 tons going to the Xingfeng landfill and 1,000 tons to the incinerator in Likeng.

China’s tap water is still not safe to drink despite the adoption of stricter standards concerning drinking water quality, according to Tsinghua University Professor Wang Zhansheng. Tap water which is tested as qualified in the plants might be polluted during the delivery process, and no authorities have been appointed to supervise the implementation of the new standards to ensure their complete adoption, he added. “Many pollutants can’t be removed under the current treatment,” Wang said. The government plans to invest CNY410 billion before the end of 2015 to upgrade and construct urban water-providing facilities and meet the new standards. Aging water pipes and inadequate management of storage facilities in urban communities are also causing further pollution. Chinese experts are alarmed at the poor quality of tap water in major cities, saying a lack of government action and inadequate public attention has made widespread contamination problems even worse. Their warnings shed light on a rarely talked about issue. Even if a new guideline is adhered to at water treatment plants, they say it will still be difficult to ensure that tap water piped into homes is safe to drink because of contamination from chemicals used in the pipes connecting treatment plants and homes, and from toxic organic compounds that are soluble and difficult to remove. A survey of more than 4,400 water treatment plants three years ago found that 58% of tap water met national standards after processing, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. But the Ministry and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said the rate rose to 83% last year. Dou Yisong, Water Standards Expert at the Beijing University of Technology, warned that water pollution in the capital had yet to be brought under control despite a costly clean-up effort led by the government.

Guangzhou is cracking down on pollution by restricting car ownership although it is one of China’s biggest car manufacturing centers. The city introduced license plate auctions and lotteries that will roughly halve the number of new cars on the streets. The crackdown by the China’s third-largest city is the most restrictive in a series of moves by big cities that are putting quality of life issues before short-term economic growth, something the central government has struggled to do on a national scale. The measures have the potential to help clean up China’s notoriously dirty air and water, reduce long-term health care costs and improve the long-term quality of China’s growth. “There’s a recognition finally that growth at all costs is not sustainable,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, Managing Director of consulting firm Silk Road Associates. The central government in Beijing is pushing back against further restrictions on vehicles because of worries about the huge car industry, said An Feng, Senior Adviser in Beijing to transport policymakers. Polluting factories being pushed out of increasingly affluent cities in southeastern China are being turned away by poorer cities in western and northern areas unless they install costly equipment to control emissions, said Stanley Lau, Deputy Chairman of the Hong Kong Federation of Industries, a trade group representing manufacturers that employ nearly 10 million workers in China.

A trading scheme for developed nations to meet greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments while subsidizing new emission reduction projects in developing countries is on the verge of breakdown, according to a global energy think tank. Weak demand from Europe for emission credits saw only half of the scheme’s one billion tons of approved credits bought, with the other half waiting for buyers, said Joan MacNaughton, the London-based World Energy Council’s Executive Chair of Energy and Climate Policy Assessment. The possible collapse of the scheme could negatively impact Chinese wind power producers who earn more than 20% of their pre-tax profit from selling carbon credits to European firms. China Datang Corp Renewable Power reported that its carbon credit income plunged 52% in the first half, while that of Huaneng Renewables sank 71%. According to World Energy Council Analysts, if nothing was done to stimulate demand or restrict supply, the amount of excess emission credits would swell to between 3.4 billion and 4 billion units by 2020, from 500 million now, MacNaughton said. Governments should augment their emission reduction ambition and pool resources to buy up some of the excess credits, to help revitalize the carbon market, or risk its collapse. She said that despite some shortcomings, the system was considered a proven market-based method to reduce emissions globally. MacNaughton said China’s worsening global ranking in energy-consumption pollution control was likely to continue this year. It was ranked 87th out of 92 countries last year, worsening from 80th in 2010 in terms of its environmental impact mitigation performance, based on an annual assessment by the Council, the South China Morning Post reported.