Lead smelter severely pollutes Anhui town
December 20, 2012 Category Environment, Pollution
Tianying in China’s Anhui province has been severely polluted by a state-owned lead smelter and foundry. The town once accounted for half of China’s total lead output, but its land is now uninhabitable and its water undrinkable. In 2007, the Blacksmith Institute, a New York-based non-profit group that helps clean up polluted sites, included Tianying in its list of the world’s most polluted regions. For China’s new leadership, reversing the environmental destruction wreaked by three decades of unrestrained economic growth is among its highest priorities. In a pledge taken up by the new leadership, outgoing President Hu Jintao said in his address to the Communist Party Congress in October that the country had to “reverse the trend of ecological deterioration and build a beautiful China”. Environment Minister Zhou Shengxian reinforced the pledge at a briefing in Beijing, saying China needed to “quickly change the current situation in which too much emphasis is put on economic growth and too little on environmental protection”. In Tianying the government and the town’s largest employer Jiaxin Group are all but indistinguishable. China’s richer, coastal regions have improved environmental conditions over the last 10 years, driven as much by the profit motive as by tougher regulation. Rehabilitated land in Beijing or Shanghai can be turned into lucrative real estate. But Beijing has struggled to provide the incentives for poorer regions like Anhui to clean up. “The places I worry about in China are no longer the large wealthy metropolises but the small township and village enterprises – a lot of those are ignored and highly polluting and toxic to the very poorest communities,” said Richard Fuller, the Blacksmith Institute’s founder and President. Tianying today is not as polluted as it was a decade ago. A 2002 study showed lead concentrations were as much as 10 times higher than national standards and children had suffered “adverse effects” as a result of prolonged exposure to the metal, but the worst small-scale smelters and recycling workshops have been shut down, and production was left to large state firms like the Jiaxin Group. Local authorities have also set up a wetland preserve nearby and forced the town’s remaining farmers to vacate land around the factories, replacing pasture with rows of fragile saplings, the South China Morning Post reports.
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