Thwarting Dirty Migration

Thwarting Dirty Migration

Polluting companies forced out of economically advanced coastal areas take their pollution inland By Wang Hairong

Situated between undulating hills and Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, Leping City in central China’s Jiangxi Province was famous for its natural beauty and the production of highquality vegetables.

But after an industrial park opened there in 2004, farmers found their vegetable and rice yields plunge.

Leping Industry Park is home to more than 50 companies including more than 30 chemical plants, which primarily produce pharmaceutical chemicals, plastic decorations and construction materials.

Cheng Niuzai, a 63-year-old resident of Xinwan Village, which sits adjacent to the industrial park, said that the pollution was so bad that trees, flowers, fruits and vegetables could barely survive in the vicinity. Cheng said that he could only grow root vegetables such as carrots and sweet potatoes.

Sewage from the industrial park is discharged to nearby Le’an River through two open channels. One of these channels passes by Xinwan. Villagers say that as a result of the factories’ industrial ef fl uent, the water in their wells is no longer drinkable.

Another channel passes through a wastewater treatment plant in the industrial park and then fl ows into the Le’an River. However,the plant is not in operation.

“The plant, originally designed to treat domestic wastewater, is incapable of treating industrial wastewater,” said Zhu Xiaoping, Deputy Director of Leping City Environmental Protection Bureau.

According to Zhu, the plant is being upgraded and is expected to meet industrial wastewater treatment standards in June 2012.Zhu said that in the interim, heavily polluting companies in the park had been ordered to halt or restrict production.

Some of the highly polluting companies in the park were relocated to Leping from more economically advanced neighboring coastal provinces such as Zhejiang.

“Economically developed coastal areas have adopted a policy called ‘emptying the cages and changing the birds’ to transform their economic structure, and as a result, some highly polluting, energy- and labor-intensive factories and industries have been closed down to make room for cleaner industries,”said Tan Huiru, a researcher with the Jiangxi Provincial Academy of Social Sciences.

As a result, dirty industries have migrated to less developed inland areas, where local governments, hungry for higher GDP, have neglected environmental protection.

For example, Ji’an in Jiangxi once had more than 50 paper mills, most of which moved to the city after they lost their licenses in coastal provinces.

Regulation dodgers

Citing an anonymous source, theChina Youth Dailysaid that polluting companies in the pharmaceutical industry were migrating to central and west China to dodge the high costs they would have to pay for cleaner production in more regulated cities.

Treating waste generated during the production process is usually costly. For example, Zhongrun (Inner Mongolia) Co.based in Rogtoh County in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, a subsidiary of the Shijiazhuang Pharmaceutical Group headquartered in Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei Province, reportedly would have to invest 2 million-3 million yuan ($310,000-$460,000) on equipment upgrades to meet national environmental standards, and the operation cost of such equipment would slash the company’s annual pro fi ts by a third.

But bulk pharmaceutical chemical producers, with low added value and low pro fi t margins, usually engage in intense cost competition, therefore they are reluctant to invest in environmentally friendly production.

Zhongrun in fact moved to Inner Mongolia after being rejected in Hebei for generating excessive pollution. But now the company is contaminating the environment of Rogtoh County.

“Actually, clean pharmaceutical production technologies are already available. If Zhongrun were to adopt new technologies, it would produce very little waste,” said Xiao Wenwei, Deputy Director of the Rogtoh Industry Development Zone. But new technologies remain expensive.

In response, some pharmaceutical industry insiders have suggested, if bulk pharmaceutical chemical producers cease fi erce cost competition, and all of them mark up their prices by 10 percent and spend the earnings on environmental protection, things would be very different.

“While encouraging companies from economically developed areas to invest in inland areas is important, local environmental protection departments should not relax their standards for these companies simply because they can boost development,” said Tian Weizhao, Director of the Environmental Protection Department of Sichuan Province.

He suggested that environmental protection departments should be allowed to play a more active role in selecting investors, and should keep heavily polluting companies out,and strictly regulate those allowed in.

China’s Environmental Impact Assessment Law, which became effective in 2003, requires an environmental impact assessment to be completed prior to the construction of a project.

The Environmental Impact Assessment Law encourages public participation, and a document released by the State Council,China’s cabinet, in 2006 also requires construction projects that will have an environmental impact to undergo such procedures as public hearings. But in many cases, the public are not sufficiently well-informed to make decisions and they fi nd themselves unable to veto potentially harmful projects.

Local protectionism

Quite a large number of polluting companies failing environment impact assessments have obtained business licenses and started operations any way.

Yang Sujuan, an associate professor at the China University of Political Science and Law, helped Yu Mingda, a pollution victim in Zhejiang’s Pinghu City, win a case 15 years after it was filed. Yang said that local protectionism hampers hearings on pollution compensation claims.

In 1994, all the tadpoles in Yu’s frog farm died after wastewater from five local chemical companies leaked into the area. Yu suffered huge economic losses and sued these companies in the local court. The court ruled that a causal relation between the wastewater discharge and the tadpoles’ deaths could not be established.

Yang found that no environmental impact assessment had been done before the five chemical plants were set up, and no pollution treatment facilities were designed and built to serve the polluting fi rms as required by the government.

These fi ndings eventually helped Yu get compensation from polluters.

SEWAGE LAKE:Wastewater discharged by several companies in an industrial park in Rogtoh County,Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, forms a dirty arti fi cial lake,posing health hazards to nearby residents

In many regions, big polluters also tend to be big tax payers, and they are usually wellconnected with local governments. “Even though these firms clearly violated environment laws, they could still operate freely because local governments pay more attention to tax revenue and economic development than the expense of the environment and local residents’ quality of living,” Yang said.

“When ordinary people bring environment-related cases to court, they are often rejected on the pretext of insufficient evidence. Even a lawsuit is filed, the plaintiff rarely wins because of local protectionism,”said Peng Defu, an official at the Letters and Petitions Office of the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

Tian Youcheng, Vice President of the Higher People’s Court of Yunnan Province,said that environment-related cases are often widely influential in society and difficult to judge. To avoid interference from local governments, he suggested a local court should submit such cases to a higher-level court in the fi rst instance.

In addition, the draft amendment to the Civil Procedure Law submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s top legislature,on October 24, 2011, included a provision allowing relevant government departments and social groups to fi le class-action lawsuits against pollution. On October 28, 2011, the Standing Committee of the NPC reviewed the draft amendment for the fi rst time.

While under the current law, only government agencies and people directly affected by an incident are allowed to sue over environmental pollution.

“Class-action litigations filed by individuals or civic groups are seldom accepted by courts,” said Ma Yong, head of the Legal Affairs Department of the All-China Environment Federation, a Beijing-based NGO. Ma said most of the class-action lawsuits filed by his organization were rejected by courts on the grounds of improper legal standing.

Many legal experts and environmentalists believe that if such a clause is introduced, the door for environment-related class-action litigations would open.