Heavy Metal Warfare

飞雪寒冰

Seven-year-old Liu Bingqing died in December 2008, two years after he was diagnosed with cadmium poisoning. In Xinma Village, Majiahe Township, Zhuzhou City, in central China's Hunan Province. Liu was not the first to die from contact with this toxic, bluish-white metal, a by-product of zinc production.

In early 2006, the sudden death of his fellow villager, Luo Shaokun, had already sparked cadmium-related health and environmental concerns. A government-administered physical test found excessive levels of cadmium in the urine of more than 1,100 Xinma villagers, with severely excessive levels in 200 residents.     

Due to the widespread cadmium pollution, farmland in Xinma is now largely deserted and local farmers have to buy food from outside. Expensive drinking water is brought from some 10 km distance.
  
But according to Wen Tiejun, Head of Zhuzhou's Environmental Protection Bureau, Xinma Village is not the worst area in Zhuzhou, China's worst-affected city.

In Zhuzhou's Qingshuitang Industrial District, home of the country's largest zinc and lead producer, the monitoring agency found that the concentration of cadmium, mercury and lead in local vegetables is almost 65 times, 186 times and 66 times, respectively, the national safety standard for pollutants allowed in food.

And indeed, Zhuzhou is just one location along China's most infamous stream of heavy metal pollution, the Xiang River. Running from south to north, the Xiang drains 95,000 square kilometers and supplies drinking water for at least 20 million people.

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Nonferrous metals mining and smelting have been a traditional pillar of Hunan's economic growth. While its lead, zinc and antimony production is the country's largest, Hunan's output of seven other nonferrous metals ranks within the top three. The cities of Hengyang, Xiangtang and Chenzhou are Hunan's three other top sources of pollution from nonferrous mining operations.

Caijing learned that the ratio between the amount of tapped nonferrous metal and the total reserves in a mine averages about 50 percent in Hunan. Associated ores discovered along with the major ores have long been either discarded as slag or discharged as sewage. The province has a mere 25 percent efficiency for recycling and application of associated ores. In general, Hunan's resource processing capability is 20 percentage points lower than in developed countries.
Loaded Stream

Pan Biling, Deputy Director of Hunan's Environmental Protection Department, reports that mercury, cadmium, lead and arsenic discharged into the Xiang River in 2007 accounted for 54.5 percent, 37 percent, 6 percent and 14.1 percent of the country's total discharge, respectively.

Between 2002 and 2007, Sanshiliuwan district of Linwu County in northern Chenzhou, saw an illegal mining boom. On a patch of hilly land of about 10 square kilometers, several hundred mines and more than 60 scouring plants opened business, often under the sponsorship of corrupt officials. They poured waste and sewage heavily contaminated by heavy metals into the river.

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Qingshuitang, another heavy polluter on the upper fork of the Xiang River, is 30 km from the source of drinking water for the city of Xiangtan, and 100 km above Changsha further downstream.

Some 108,440 cubic meters of heavy-metal-tainted tailings and mud are now estimated to lie in the waterbed of the Sanshiliuwan section, including 95 tons of cadmium, 297 tons of lead, two tons of mercury and 160 tons of arsenic.  

"In some sections of the Xiang River, the heavy metal levels exceed national standards by several hundred times," said Zhang Zhiguang, Chief of the Technology Division of Hunan's Environmental Protection Department. "You could just dredge the mud and process it in a refinery."

Dredging the Xiang River could also be a reason for concern, however. On January 6, 2006, sediment and sewage containing excessive levels of cadmium were stirred up in the course of a dredging project at Xiawangang port of Qingshuitang, and flowed to several major cities downstream.

Since then, people who used to tap sands in the river have been stopped within two kilometers of the port.

Professor Chen Guiqiu of Environmental Science and Engineering School at
Hunan University was in charge of controlling sediment and mud at Xiagangwan.
He said he had never seen a river so heavily polluted and with so many complications

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With the mayors' personal involvement, the situation seems to be improving. In Qingshuitang, for instance, all local enterprises now steadily comply with minimum national requirements.

Zhou Zheyun, security chief of Zhuzhou Smelter Group Co., Ltd, the country's largest lead and zinc producer, told Caijing that the company has invested 1 billion yuan in advanced zinc production technology, as an initial step of a four-phase 4.7-billion-yuan plan to upgrade zinc and lead production, including environmental protection measures.

Meanwhile, the smelter has increased its sewage recycling rate from the previous 40 percent to between 50 and 60 percent early this year. Its sewage discharge into the Xiang River has met the national requirement.

But according to Zhang of Hunan's Environmental Protection Department, Zhuzhou Smelter Group is an exception to the rule.

There are many mining businesses operating along the Xiang River, some for a long time, and their technologies and techniques are outdated, Zhang said. "Technological innovation costs money, and many enterprises simply can't afford that investment."
   
Many mines without sewage treatment facilities are still operating along the Xiang River, despite efforts to shut them down.

"It's tremendously difficult to close down even a small one," said Tang Hong, deputy chief of the pollution control division of Hunan's Environmental Protection Department.

Tang cited an example in Yongzhou City in central Hunan. When a small smelter on the list of the government's closure plan refused to stop production well after its deadline had passed, the county chief, flanked by local NPC delegates, relevant government agencies and armed paramilitary police, stormed into the plant and destroyed its furnaces with three tons of dynamite.

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Soiled Land

While the government is keeping close watch over the potential polluters, the heavy metals that accumulated in the riverbed and soil over past decades demand urgent attention, too.   

In Chenzhou, on a tributary of the Xiang River in southern Hunan, half of the 530-square-kilometer urban area has been polluted by cadmium, which seeped as deep as 20 cm into the soil in some areas.

Recent development shows that inland areas off the river have not avoided pollution either. Since a June chemical leak at the Xianghe Chemical Plant in Zhentou Township, Liuyang City, in eastern Hunan, more than 100 residents in the stricken area have been tested with indications of dangerously high concentrations of cadmium in their bodies. Four square kilometers of soil and crops growing there were contaminated.   

Some of the farmland contaminated by heavy metals may no longer be allowed to grow crops.
In Zhuzhou, 15.66 square kilometers of contaminated land will be developed, according to a decision by the Ministry of Land Resources in 2008 in response to a local government report.

Local environment officials called the measure only "a small step." Wen of Zhuzhou Environmental Protection Bureau said more than 120 square kilometers of heavily polluted land, whose cadmium content exceeds national standards by five times, are not included in the plan yet.

On the other hand, Wen admitted that it is not realistic to develop all the contaminated land quickly as relocation of the local people can be difficult. Wen said that residents are looking for alternative control methods, such as transplanting soil, growing cotton or ramie instead of food crops, or using innovative techniques to reduce cadmium absorption by crops. Wen admitted these technologies are unproven over time.

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Systemic Change

In tandem with technological upgrades, regulatory and state funding changes are also taking shape.

Under a deal signed on April 18, 2009, between Zhou, the environment minister, and Zhou, Hunan's governor, the province will start a series of pilot reforms in environmental and economic policies and strengthen cooperation with the central government.

In 2008, Hunan rolled out a pilot environmental pollution liability insurance program. A plan drafted by the Hunan affiliate of the Ping An Insurance (Group) Co., Ltd. and the Hunan Environmental Protection Bureau listed 18 enterprises from heavily-polluting sectors such as chemicals, nonferrous metals, iron and steel, for the pilot program.

The Bureau was given more authority in June 2009 and was renamed the Hunan Environmental Protection Department, to play a greater coordination role in heavy metal pollution control on the Xiang River.   

But reform is not easy. Pilot programs are finding their own bottlenecks. Some local officials say further technological improvements and factory closures cannot be accomplished without funding. They say it is unfair for the local budget to shoulder the sole financial responsibility for pollution control after the central government received substantial tax revenues from Hunan's heavy industry sector for decades.

Zhang Zhiguang, technology chief of Hunan's Environmental Protection Department, says state money is on the way. According to the country's 11th five-year National Economic and Social Development Plan (2006 through 2010), 100 million yuan are to be spent on heavy metal control research projects on the Xiang River, most of which will be devoted to Qingshuitang Industrial Zone. Beijing University, Hunan University and a number of other local universities are taking part.

During China's National People's Congress and People's Political Consultative Conference in March, Zhang Lijun, Vice Minister of Environmental Protection, told the media that the ministry plans to add the Xiang River to its priority list of rivers for control. At the moment, four of China's major rivers are black-listed.

Should the ministry's plan be realized, the central government will inject as much as 70 billion yuan by 2010 and 300 billion yuan by 2015 for pollution control on the Xiang River.

Investment aside, experts say disclosure of information, especially facts relevant to public health, is key to pollution control, and they urged the Hunan environmental protection authorities to be more proactive in this regard.

The national land census, a one-billion yuan project jointly launched by the central Ministry of Environmental Protection and Ministry of Land Resources in 2006, is near completion. So is a situation report on Hunan's soil pollution sponsored by the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

Some speculate that the full results of these documents may not be published due to concern that the gravity of the findings might spark public panic.

ami-liu

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