AN AVOIDABLE ASSAULT

Total disregard for the environment by industry and government has led to a landscape pockmarked with pools of pollution

By Wang Shan

Fetid Pools

View of a pit of about 170,000 square metres of waste, Nanzhaofu Village, Langfang City, Hebei Province, April 20, 2017

Photo by cfp

On April 18, 2017, photos of a cluster of red and yellow pools of polluted water around a village in Dacheng County, Hebei Province, went viral online after being released by an environmental protection NGO. The largest pit had a surface area of more than 170,000 square metres of industrial waste, equal to 24 standard football pitches.

On April 19, the Ministry of Environmental Protection made an announcement to confirm the pollution and pledged to launch a joint investigation. Three days later, Tian Weiyong, head of the Environmental Inspection Bureau under the ministry, said the pools were the result of the illegal discharge of industrial pollutants and the government will “crack down on the act at the national level and show no tolerance to such incidents.”

Authorities later disclosed that the biggest dumping pit in Nanzhaofu Village, Dacheng County, around 130km south of Beijing, was located at a former brick-making plant built in 1982 that ceased production in 2016. Another pit in the village, covering 30,000 square metres, had been home to a chemical fertiliser plant.

Visiting the area, a ChinaReport reporter found that pits of various sizes were scattered across the village like scars, occupying a third of the arable land in the village. “The villagers are strongly opposed to the brick-making plant because it destroyed our hometown,” a villager told our reporter on condition of anonymity.