The year 2000 witnessed a significant improvement in water quality in the
Huaihe River, in East China's Anhui Province. After years of effort to curb
pollution, by the end of 2000, the water in the river was getting cleaner - the
quality of its mainstream water reached Grade III, suitable for daily life, and
tributary water reached Grade IV, suitable for industrial usage.
The water monitoring on the Huaihe River in April this year, however,
presented disappointing results.
With pollution on the upswing, the water quality of only 4 of the 31
surveying sections was ranked Grade IV; that of one section was Grade V,
suitable for agricultural use; while the water quality of the remaining sections
was so seriously polluted that all failed to even reach Grade V.
According to a report by the Huaihe River Harnessing Committee, the pollution
of the river is twice as serious as the 2000 target allows and the situation is
getting worse.
Pollution in the Huaihe River, the major water supplier for the cities and
towns bordering it, poses a great threat to people's health and life. This
worrisome fact must urge us to check what has gone wrong.
Industrial pollution is the biggest culprit. Of the 506 factories monitored
along the Huaihe River, the discharge water of only 242 of them reached State
standards last year. Of the factories whose discharge water does not reach
required standards, some are polluters who simply restarted operation after
having been shut down prior to 2000. All of these factors have resulted in
increased industrial pollution to the river.
In addition, the river is overloaded with sewage pollution, which accounts
for about half of its total pollution.
This increase is precisely a result of the loosening of controls by the local
authorities.
Take the industrial discharge, for example. The State Council issued an order
stating that all discharge must reach required standards by 1997. The State
ordered the closure of poorly equipped small factories causing serious
pollution.
The fact is that many of those small factories are still in operation and
pouring out pollutants. And some large enterprises try every means possible to
discharge unprocessed sewage to earn maximum profit, at the expense of the
environment. Local governments either did not bother to check or just winked at
the violations of some major local tax-payers.
The construction of sewage treatment facilities has also slowed down.
According to previous planning, 52 sewage treatment plants should have been
built during the Ninth Five-Year Plan period (1996-2000), treating 40 per cent
of the total sewage entering the river. But today there are only 31 treatment
plants along the river.
The harnessing of the pollution on Huaihe River in the final years of last
century was a major operation. But there was no follow-up programme. Now the
river is repolluted and the situation seems even worse than ever.
And the return of pollution on the Huaihe is surely not an isolated example.
The State Environment Protection Administration circulated a notice Wednesday
about the top ten environmental cases investigated and prosecuted this year,
mostly involving illegal discharge of pollutants or a return to old levels. It
also announced that 6,143 enterprises had been ordered to shut down for
violation of the country's environmental protection law.
Now the administration is sending inspection teams around the country to
supervise the containment of illegal discharge of pollutants by local factories.
Protecting the environment is a demanding task requiring continuous joint
efforts. The ultimate solution to illegal discharges lies in industrial
restructuring and upgrading, and improvement in government functions and the
legal system.
Local authorities should place environmental protection before economic
development and abandon local protectionism.
Environment protection departments should strengthen enforcement of the law
and punishment of violators. Only by doing these things can we expect to see the
Huaihe River flow clean again.
