Only three major cities met pollution standards last year
June 12, 2014 Category Environment, Pollution
Only three of China’s 74 major cities met state pollution standards last year, according to the 2013 China Environmental Situation Report. Haikou, Zhoushan and Lhasa were the least polluted while Beijing, Tianjin and cities in Hebei province were the worst. Of the 10 cities that suffered the most serious problems, seven were in Hebei, including the worst three – Xingtai, Shijiazhuang and Handan. Beijing residents breathed “good” air on just 175 days last year. In Shanghai, environmental authorities said the city had 241 “good” days. Li Ganjie, Vice Minister of Environmental Protection, quoted the report as saying that although China’s environment had improved in general, water quality is “not optimistic” and air quality in cities is “serious.” In China’s top 10 river valleys in 2013, about 9% of the water sections was class V, the worst level. Of 4,778 monitoring sites for groundwater almost 60% were poor or extremely poor. Water quality in the East China Sea and in four of China’s nine biggest bays was extremely poor. Soil pollution and land degradation are also serious, according to Li, who said arable land had been reduced by 80,200 hectares in 2013, and a total of 295 million hectares, or 30.7% of China’s land area, was suffering soil erosion. About 82.8% of the polluted land was contaminated by inorganic materials with the top three pollutants cadmium, nickel and arsenic. The level of major pollutants has dropped in the past year. Chemical oxygen demand emissions were reduced by 2.9%, while emissions of sulfur dioxide dropped by 3.5%, but compared to 2012, the percentage of class V water quality in the 10 major river basins dropped by only 1.2 percentage points.
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