Clear The Air News Blog Rotating Header Image

March, 2015:

Chai Ling’s documentary on pollution brings out the stark truth

Buildings amid heavy air pollution, in Wuhan, Hubei. Photo: Reuters

Buildings amid heavy air pollution, in Wuhan, Hubei. Photo: Reuters

Interestingly, an online documentary on air pollution has become an instant hit on the mainland. Produced by former CCTV news presenter Chai Jing, the 103-minute video was estimated to have drawn hundreds of millions of viewers across the nation within days. It even prompted a personal note of thanks from the new environment protection chief and boosted trading of environment-related shares in the stock market. Expectations are running high that more anti-pollution measures will be announced during the annual assemblies for lawmakers and political advisers in Beijing.

Entitled Under the Dome, the report resembles the slide-show format of An Inconvenient Truth – a documentary on global warming by former US vice-president Al Gore in 2006. Chai, a 39-year-old mother, took up the smog issue after her baby girl was diagnosed with a tumour before birth, according to an interview on People’s Daily website. The documentary points fingers at powerful oil companies and weak enforcement, saying half a million people die prematurely because of air pollution every year. The criticisms and allegations are not groundbreaking; they were even dismissed as unscientific by critics and the companies involved. But the truth remains that 90 per cent of the 161 cities where air quality is monitored failed to meet official standards in 2014, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. With a celebrity background and a personal touch to a burning issue affecting everyone, Chai has struck a chord with her powerful statement: “I am not afraid of death. But I don’t want to live on like this.”

Equally controversial is the way the video came about. The former journalist reportedly spent about one million yuan (HK$1.26 million) on the production. That it has received initial positive response from state media and the government has raised much speculation. An official gag order for mainland media finally came on Tuesday, apparently to avoid “blurring the focus” of the two assemblies in the capital. Whatever the circumstances, it is to be hoped that the documentary will spur officials to do more in cleaning up the air.

Source URL (modified on Mar 5th 2015, 2:22am): http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1729604/chai-lings-documentary-pollution-brings-out-stark-truth

Stop blame game on China’s air pollution, environment minister says

13 February, 2015

Nectar Gan

Mainland cities should stop blaming each other for air pollution and shoulder their own responsibilities, the environment ministry said yesterday.

Some cities suffering bad air quality were too quick to highlight the influence of neighbours when analysing the source of pollution, said deputy environmental minister Zhai Qing.

“Mutual influence does exist, and is relatively serious in some places.

“But at this stage, cities must not overstress the influence of others and pass the buck. If it is emphasised too much, it will affect our strict implementation of countermeasures,” Zhai said.

In a bid to find solutions to the country’s smog problem, authorities have ordered 35 major cities and municipalities to release detailed analyses of sources of PM2.5 by the end of the year. PM2.5 are superfine particles which lodge deep inside lungs and are considered the most dangerous to human health.

Beijing’s environmental protection department published a report last June that found 28 to 36 per cent of the capital’s PM2.5 particles came from neighbouring areas. Last month Shanghai released a similar report, which found that 16 to 36 per cent of the city’s air pollutants came from surrounding areas.

Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said regional influences could not be ignored. However, he added: “This does not mean that cities don’t need to control their own pollution, because they also influence others, especially those cities with large levels of emissions. In fact, emphasising regional influences means cities should shoulder even more responsibilities.”

Ma said that while cities should deal with their own pollution, joint prevention and control on a regional level was a more difficult task that needed to be coordinated by the central government.

China has exercised strict controls on regional pollution by shutting down factories and construction sites and taking vehicles off the roads during international events such as the Beijing Olympics, Shanghai Expo, Guangzhou Asian Games and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

The measures were effective but unsustainable, Ma said. “Those were administrative orders imposed regardless of the specific situations of the enterprises. They won’t work in the long run. We should use the legal approach, relying on environmental laws and regulations to regulate the factories.”

Ma said that the problems with current regional environmental regulations were how to implement them fairly and strictly, and how to guard against local protection of illegal polluters.

“Regional cooperation should be based on mutual trust, which in turn depends on open information on the cities’ emission data,” he said.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1712418/dont-pass-buck-chinas-air-pollution-minister

China produces about a third of plastic waste polluting the world’s oceans, says report

13 February, 2015

Li Jing

Plastic bottles, barrels, bags, toothbrushes and even syringes are piled high around rural villagers and migrant workers tasked with recycling it.

They sort, clean and break up the rubbish before putting the pieces into furnaces where they are melted and remoulded, eventually to be processed into small granules.

The scene is typical of many family-run plastic recycling mills clustered in rural areas of Hebei, Shandong and Jiangsu provinces, to name a few, according to independent documentary director Wang Jiuliang, who has been filming the business for several years.

Yet the tale shows just one side of China’s huge plastic footprint. A study published this week in the journal Science said China was responsible for nearly 30 per cent of the plastic pollution clogging the world’s oceans.

The environmental and health impacts of China’s unregulated plastic recycling business were immense: the cleaning process pollutes waterways, melting and burning the scraps released toxic pollutants into the air, and leftover pieces unfit for recycling were dumped directly into riverbeds, Wang said.

His documentary, Plastic Kingdom, tells the story of how an 11-year-old girl almost became one such plastic recycler spending three years helping her parents – who wanted to make enough money from the business to send her to school, but failed.

According to the new study, led by Jenna Jambeck, an assistant professor of environment engineering at the University of Georgia, an estimated eight million tonnes of waste plastic enters the oceans each year from the world’s 192 countries with coastlines, based on 2010 data.

China’s heavily populated coastal cities contributed between 1.3 million and 3.5 million tonnes of the waste, the study found.

Chen Liwen, a researcher with the environmental group Nature University in Beijing, who has focused on the problem in her research, was not surprised by the findings.

“Plastic waste that has no value for recycling is either burned directly or dumped in waterways and eventually ends up in the sea. This is very common in China’s rural areas, where there is no waste management in place,” she said. Such waste includes thin plastic bags and plastic foam, used for food packaging.

China banned such bags in 2008, but enforcement is lax. The prohibition on plastic foam was lifted in 2013, sparking criticism from environmentalists, but even when the ban was in place, about 15 billion disposable plastic lunch boxes were produced every year, official statistics say.

Meanwhile, China was also the world’s largest importer of plastic waste, much of it from the United States, according to Wang, the filmmaker. Some plastic waste was even smuggled into China, as some areas of the business had become very profitable.

The study, published on Thursday, also found eight of the top 10 biggest contributors to the problem were in Asia, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and Bangladesh.

The US, the only wealthy industrialised nation in the top 20, ranked at No20. Coastal European Union nations combined would rank 18th. This is mostly because developed countries had systems to trap and collect plastic waste, Jambeck said.

The findings mark the most detailed assessment yet of the scale of plastic waste circulating in the oceans, imperiling wildlife and blighting once-pristine sites.

Jambeck projects that by 2025 the total accumulated plastic waste in the oceans will reach around 155 million tonnes. That’s based on population trends and continued waste management disposal problems, although there may be some early signs of change, she said. “We need to wake up and see our waste,” Jambeck said. “I think the problem in some ways has sort of snuck up around us.”

Researchers estimated more than nine million tonnes would end up in the oceans this year.

Additional reporting by Bloomberg and Associated Press

http://www.scmp.com/article/1711744/china-produces-about-third-plastic-waste-polluting-worlds-oceans-says-report

India’s filthy air is cutting 660 million lives short by three years, research claims

22 February, 2015

Filthy air reducing lifespan by more than three years for hundreds of millions of citizens – and it’s likely to get worse, study reveals

India’s filthy air is cutting 660 million lives short by about three years – while nearly all of the country’s 1.2 billion citizens are breathing in harmful levels of pollution, new research reveals.

The study, by a team of environmental economists at US universities, highlights just how extensive India’s air problems have become after years of pursuing an all-growth agenda with little regard for the environment.

While New Delhi last year earned the dubious title of being the world’s most polluted city, the problem extends nationwide, with 13 Indian cities now on the World Health Organisation’s list of the 20 most polluted.

That pollution burden is estimated to be costing more than half the population at least 3.2 years of their lives, according to the study led by Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago and involving economists from Harvard and Yale universities.

The most polluted regions, falling generally in northern India, are also among India’s most populous.

“The extent of the problem is actually much larger than what we normally understand,” said Anant Sudarshan, the India director of the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago and one of the study’s co-authors.

“We think of it as an urban problem, but the rural dimension has been ignored.”

Added up, those lost years come to a staggering 2.1 billion for the entire nation.

Greenstone said that while “the conventional definition of growth has ignored the health consequences of air pollution … this study demonstrates that air pollution retards growth by causing people to die prematurely.”

For the study, published in Economic & Political Weekly, the authors borrowed from their previous work in China, where they determined life expectancy dropped by three years for every 100 migrograms of fine particulate matter, called PM2.5, above safe levels.

PM2.5 is of especially great health concern because, with the particles having diameters no greater than 2.5 micrometres, they are small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs.

The authors note, however, that their estimations may be too conservative because they’re based in part on 2012 satellite data that tend to underestimate PM2.5 levels.

India has a sparse system for monitoring air quality, with sensors installed in only a few cities and almost unheard of in the countryside.

Yet rural air pollution remains high courtesy of industrial plants, poor fuel standards, extensive garbage burning and a heavy reliance on diesel for electricity generation in areas not connected with the grid.

Wind patterns also push the pollution on to the plains below the Himalayan mountain range.

India sets permissible PM2.5 levels at 40 micrograms per cubic metre – twice the WHO’s safe level. Still, the study says, 99.5 per cent of the population is living with air pollution levels above the WHO’s limit.

While India has pledged to grow its clean energy sector, with huge boosts for solar and wind power, it has also committed to tripling its coal-fired electricity capacity to 450 gigawatts by 2030.

Yet there are still no regulations for pollutants like sulfur dioxide or mercury emissions, while fuel standards remain far below Western norms and existing regulations are often ignored.

To meet its goal for coal-fired electricity, the Power Ministry says the country will double coal production to a billion tonnes within five years, after already approving dozens of new coal plants which experts say will double sulphur dioxide levels.

http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1720690/indias-filthy-air-cutting-660-million-lives-short-three-years-research

Hong Kong rural leader denies waste dumping in HK$1.3m claim

A rural leader denied illegally dumping waste on one of his villagers’ properties, claiming he was being set up for money, the High Court heard yesterday.

Sheung Shui rural committee chairman Hau Chi-keung denied allegations by farmer Lau Oi-kiu that he instructed property agent Man Chun-shing, another defendant in the case, to carry out fly-tipping on Lau’s two fields. The court heard that Hau and Man allegedly damaged Lau’s two farming fields in July, 2009. She is claiming HK$1.3 million in damages from Hau.

Hau told the court yesterday: “All they need is money by taking this to court.”

Cross-examined by Lau’s barrister Yeung Ming-tai, Hau said: “I have so much land. Why do I need to occupy others’ land?” The court heard that Hau was a landlord in Ho Sheung Heung in Sheung Shui. “I have a big fortune,” he said. “People say I will get rich if land resumption is carried out. Yes, I will get rich, and it is out of my control.”

Hau said that after mid-July in 2009, government officials informed him of illegal waste dumping in Ho Sheung Heung. He said as a rural representative, he was duty-bound to remove the waste and restore the land to its original condition by planting grass and fruit trees.

He said he did this on behalf of the rural committee.

Court heard earlier that Man had admitted his liability for fly-tipping but disputed the compensation amount.

Lau’s son, Hau Tai-lok, told the court that the two defendants had threatened his family several times in hopes of scaring them away.

He claimed that outsiders dared not to carry out large-scale waste dumping in Ho Sheung Heung unless they were assisted by “people who had power in the village”.

During cross-examination, Hau often brought humour to the four-day trial by repeatedly calling Lau’s counsel “lawyer So” [his surname is Yeung] and asking for the surname of his own counsel.

Judge Mr Justice Paul Lam Ting-kwok also had to remind Hau, who often gave lengthy yet irrelevant answers, to listen carefully to counsel’s questions and answer accordingly.

In response to the judge’s reminders, Hau said: “If I had paid attention to what my teachers said, I would have become a judge today.”

Both parties are due to give their closing submissions today.

Source URL (modified on Mar 4th 2015, 11:59pm): http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1729523/hong-kong-rural-leader-denies-waste-dumping-hk13m-claim

It is possible to wage war on waste without killing porpoises

Martin Williams

Christine Loh Kung-wai, undersecretary for the environment, writes that she and her colleagues see no conflicts between plans to build a “waste-to-energy project”, that is, a massive trash incinerator, and Hong Kong’s contribution to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (“Vital project for waste management”, February 18).

Well, perhaps I can add to the explanation of Paul Melsom in his letter (“Environmental officers should seek to protect, not ruin”, February 4). I anticipate that while invisible to Ms Loh, the conflicts will be crystal clear to most people.

Essentially, the conflicts arise from waters just west of Shek Kwu Chau being a key habitat for finless porpoise, which the International Union for the Conservation of Nature classes as globally vulnerable to extinction, so should merit strong government protection efforts; yet this is the very site where the government plans to build an artificial island for one of the world’s largest waste incinerators.

As any conservationist would tell you, the best way to protect an endangered species is to safeguard its habitat. Yet the government plans to destroy a key place for the porpoise, and make a currently tranquil area busy with boat traffic plus round-the-clock work on feeding the incinerator.

Ms Loh writes of mitigation measures, such as designating nearby waters as marine park, and releasing fish fry. These may appeal to bureaucrats and engineers seeking to railroad the incinerator project through, but fail to impress conservationists such as Mr Melsom. The increasingly dire situation of the Chinese white dolphin shows that such efforts cannot compensate for the devastating effects of reclamation schemes.

Then, along with producing fumes too poisonous for it to be sited in the city, the incinerator will create highly toxic ash, and there are notions for dumping this in a landfill island to be built south of nearby Cheung Chau. So as well as severely impacting porpoises, the incinerator island will harm other wildlife and threaten human health.

Of course, Hong Kong does need to tackle its waste crisis, but should also protect biodiversity. Though officials are blinkered, there are more options than the government’s burn or bury strategy. From reducing ridiculous packaging, through increased reuse and recycling, to adopting less harmful and more advanced treatment technologies, it is possible to wage war on waste without killing porpoises.

Dr Martin Williams, director, Hong Kong Outdoors

Source URL (modified on Mar 2nd 2015, 12:01am): http://www.scmp.com/comment/letters/article/1724969/it-possible-wage-war-waste-without-killing-porpoises

Pollution Documentary ‘Under the Dome’ Blankets Chinese Internet

A new documentary on the pall blanketing China’s skies by a former state television reporter swiftly commandeered the attention of tens of millions online over the weekend.

Titled “Under the Dome,” the film is an impassioned production by Chai Jing, a well-known journalist who left China Central Television last year shortly after the birth of her first child. Since its release online on Saturday, it has racked up some 100 million views on major Chinese video portals such as Tencent and Youku.

The film’s release comes just days before the start of China’s most public annual political event – the meetings of the national legislature and a government advisory body. The environment is expected to figure prominently among the topics discussed.

The film shows Ms. Chai showing a sonogram of her unborn baby daughter, who was diagnosed with a benign tumor at birth and had to be swiftly operated upon.

“Before, I never paid attention to pollution. Wherever I went, I never wore a mask,” Ms. Chai says. But with the birth of her child, — whom she likens to a prisoner for most of her first year, kept inside away from the smog – Ms. Chai says she felt compelled to investigate the issue.

An analysis led by the Boston-based Health Effects Institute estimated that the country’s smog was responsible for some 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010 alone.

Deeply emotive, the film draws on a number of materials, from footage of her time as a reporter to official interviews to cartoon depictions of various pollutants, each wielding tiny axes directed at the human nose and throat.

“You don’t have any choice about breathing, there’s no way to avoid it,” Ms. Chai tells her audience in the documentary, throughout which she paces before a screen showing video clips or charts in a manner reminiscent of Al Gore’s call-to-action film on climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

In one particularly harrowing scene in “Under the Dome,” a doctor pulls out pieces of lymph node from a female lung cancer patient in her 50s. They are filthy and blackened from breathing the air, though the woman has never been a smoker.

The newly appointed environment minister, Chen Jining, told reporters on Sunday that he sent Ms. Chai a text to thank her for her work. The official China News Service reported that Mr. Chen drew parallels between the film and Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which helped galvanize the environmental movement in the U.S.

Many others took to social media to praise Ms. Chai’s piece, which rapidly became one of the top-trending items Sunday. “My respect to the brave Chai Jing,” wrote Chinese real estate mogul Pan Shiyi on his verified microblogging account on Weibo. “She’s a heroine.”

China has begun taking more aggressive steps against pollution. But while in 2014, concentration of PM2.5 in 74 major Chinese cities fell by 11%, according to official data, only eight of them met national standards, which are considerably laxer than World Health Organization ones.

Over the past few years, China’s growing middle class has grown increasingly more vocal and concerned about air pollution, especially since 2013, when the government began releasing PM2.5 information following public pressure. Air masks have become a more common sight in big cities, while apps tracking daily smog levels have proliferated.

Ms. Chai didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview posted to the website of People’s Daily, she said she spent about 1 million yuan of her own funds on the project.

A journalist who built a reputation for herself investigating the SARS pneumonia outbreak and coal mine accidents, Ms. Chai tackles questions such as why air pollution spikes in Beijing overnight. She finds that despite being marked as meeting national standards, many diesel trucks don’t carry the required emissions-control equipment, something that a Beijing environmental official acknowledges on camera is a widespread problem.

While laws may be stringent in China, enforcement is another question: to date no manufacturers of such lorries have yet been punished under the law, Ms. Chai says.

Ms. Chai’s film also drew attention for its focus on state-owned oil firms and her criticism of the country’s lagging fuel standards. An official she interviews on camera tells her that’s because industry representatives dominate the committee charged with helping set such standards.

The film has moments of small uplift, such as when Ms. Chai reports a nearby vendor cooking meat-filled pastries for failing to install the required equipment to minimize its emissions; the equipment is subsequently added. She concludes by exhorting viewers to do the same and help alert authorities to any violations.

“This is how history is made. With thousands of ordinary people one day saying, ‘No, I’m not satisfied, I don’t want to wait…I want to stand up and do a little something,’” says Ms. Chai in the film’s closing moments.

– Te-Ping Chen with contributions from Yang Jie

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/03/02/pollution-documentary-under-the-dome-blankets-chinese-internet/tab/print/

Documentary on Air Pollution Grips China

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/documentary-on-air-pollution-in-china-grips-a-nation/?_r=1

Millions of Chinese, riveted and outraged, watched a 104-minute documentary video over the weekend that begins with a slight woman in jeans and a white blouse walking on to a stage dimly lit in blue. As an audience looks on somberly, the woman, Chai Jing, displays a graph of brown-red peaks with occasional troughs.

“This was the PM 2.5 curve for Beijing in January 2013, when there were 25 days of smog in that one month,” explains Ms. Chai, a former Chinese television reporter, referring to a widely used gauge of air pollution. Back then, she says, she paid little attention to the smog engulfing much of China and affecting 600 million people, even as her work took her to places where the air was acrid with fumes and dust.

“But,” Ms. Chai says with a pause, “when I returned to Beijing, I learned that I was pregnant.”

She has said her concerns about what the filthy air would mean for her infant daughter’s health prompted her to produce the documentary, “Under the Dome.” It was published online Saturday, and swiftly inspired an unusually passionate eruption of public and mass media discussion. The newly appointed minister of environmental protection even likened the documentary to “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson’s landmark exposé of chemical pollution.

“I’d never felt afraid of pollution before, and never wore a mask no matter where,” Ms. Chai, 39, says in the video. “But when you carry a life in you, what she breathes, eats and drinks are all your responsibility, and then you feel the fear.”

By early Monday morning, “Under the Dome” had been played more than 20 million times on Youku, a popular video-sharing site, and it was also being viewed widely on other sites.

Tens of thousands of viewers posted comments about the video, many of them parents who identified with Ms. Chai’s concern for her daughter. Some praised her for forthrightly condemning the industrial interests, energy conglomerates and bureaucratic hurdles that she says have obstructed stronger action against pollution. Others lamented that she was able to do so only after leaving her job with the state-run China Central Television.

“Support Chai Jing or those like her who stand up like this to speak the truth,” said one of the comments — which exceeded 25,000 by Sunday afternoon — on Youku. “In this messed-up country that’s devoid of law, cold-hearted, numb and arrogant, they’re like an eye-grabbing sign that shocks the soul.”

The documentary is part science lecture, part investigative exposé and part memoir, and Ms. Chai’s own story has become a focus of praise and criticism. Ms. Chai and her husband were wealthy and privileged enough for her to have given birth in the United States, according to a flurry of news reports last year, and some comments accused her of hypocrisy. Her daughter was born with a benign tumor that required surgery; newspapers have quoted scientists who have challenged Ms. Chai’s suggestion in the video that smog was to blame.

But most of the reaction welcomed her initiative in producing and posting the documentary with her own money. Indeed, some have wondered how Ms. Chai got away with it.

China has been tightening restrictions on the Internet, and the documentary is somewhat critical of the government. Access to the video was not blocked, but by Sunday evening popular Chinese websites had removed prominent headlines and links about “Under the Dome” from their front pages, possibly at the behest of nervous propaganda officials.

Some officials, however, may even welcome it as an opportunity to build support for anti-smog measures. The website of People’s Daily, the main Communist Party newspaper, was one of the first to post “Under the Dome.” And the new minister of environmental protection, Chen Jining, praised the video.

Mr. Chen said at a news conference for Chinese reporters in Beijing on Sunday that the documentary reminded him of Ms. Carson’s “Silent Spring,” which on publication in 1962 inspired a public uproar about excessive use of pesticides, The Beijing Times reported, citing the Xinhua news agency.

“I think this work has an important role in promoting public awareness of environmental health issues,” Mr. Chen said, “so I’m particularly pleased about this event.”

Ms. Chai, 39, was born in Shanxi Province, a part of China abundant in coal, and bathed in noxious pollution. She told the website of People’s Daily that she decided to set aside worries about making her daughter the subject of a video.

“If I had not had this kind of emotional impetus,” she told the website, “I would have found it very difficult to spend such a long time completing this.”

Chai Jing’s review: Under the Dome – Investigating China’s Smog 柴静雾霾调查:穹顶之下