My Le

Professor Robb A. Bajema

EL 100

April 26th, 2013

Air pollution in China

Air pollution is one of the most serious environmental problems in China. According to a new analysis, approximately 1.2 million people die prematurely from exposure to outdoor air pollution in China. A study by Greenpeace and Beijing University focusing on four Chinese cities estimates the number of people dying prematurely from air pollution is close to three times that killed by traffic accidents. The air has been classified as hazardous to human health, at its worst hitting pollution levels 25 times that considered safe in the US. The entire city is blanketed in a thick grey smog that smells of coal and stings the eyes, leading to official warnings to stay inside.

The majority of the air pollution in China is generated by the burning of coal to generate electric power. China gets 80 percent of electricity and 70 percent its total energy from coal, much of it polluting high-sulphur coal. Around six million tons of coal is burned everyday to power factories, heat homes and cook meals. Jerry Goodell wrote in Natural History magazine: “In China coal is everywhere. It’s piled up on sidewalks, pressed into bricks, and stacked neat the back doors of homes. It’s stockpiled into small mountains in open fields, and carted around behinds bicycles and wheezing locomotives. Plumes of coal smoke rise from rusty stacks on every urban horizon. Soot covers every windowsill and ruins the collar of every white shirt. The Chinese burn less coal per capita than America does but in sheer tonnage, they burn twice as much.” It is relatively plentiful and cheap but very dirty. Many places in China smell like high-sulfur coal and leaded gasoline. The underground coal fires are consuming 20 to 30 million tons of coal a year, pumping tons of ash, carbon dioxide, methane, carbon monoxide and sulfur compounds into the atmosphere. There are 56 underground coals fire currently burning in China. The Wude coal field in Inner Mongolia, is the home of China’s largest coal fire and some argue one of the world’s worst environmental disasters. Sixteen of China’s coal fires burn here, extending over an area of 15 square miles. In here, the trucks carry loads from the open pit mines. Scavengers in donkey carts pick up pieces of coal that bounce off the trucks. The air is filled with black dust and acrid sulfur dioxide fumes from the coal fires that burn below the surface. Even so domestic supply is not enough. China imports large amounts of coal from Australia and other countries. In Newcastle Australia, dozens of ships waiting in line for up to two weeks at time to carry coal back to China.

The second major factors that contribute to the air pollution in china is vehicle emissions. Vehicle emissions are compounded by a lack of effective public transportation, low emission standards and the slow development of energy-saving and clean automobile technologies. The Chinese government’s promotion of the car industry to attract investment from foreign car companies, has exacerbated the problem. Beijing, with five million vehicles and rising, has seen an enormous increase in car ownership. Senior General Motors officials forecast that sales in China could top 35 million annually by 2022. That’s more than double the peak of the American market nearly a decade ago. “No market is more critical than the China market for us,” Tim Lee, president of General Motors’ International Operations, told reporters. Nowadays, China is the biggest car market in the world by number of vehicles sold. But it still lags far behind developed markets in terms of the ratio of cars to people. In 2010 in China, only 31 per 1,000 people owned a car, compared with 424 per 1,000 people in the United States. More than 13 million passenger cards were sold in China in 2012, an annual increase of 7.6 percent, according to data from IHS Automotive, and it expects an annual growth rate of 11 percent in 2013. With more than 13 million cars sold in China last year, motor vehicles have emerged as the chief culprit for the throat-choking air pollution in big cities especially Beijing. Endless lines of slow-moving cars emerge like apparitions and then disappear again into the gloom of the thick smog that has shrouded Beijing in China, and reduced its skyline to blurry gray shapes. As the Chinese middle-class expanded dramatically over the last 20 years, cars became the new symbol of prosperity. With the economy continuing to grow, the love affair with cars will bloom more, and is already posing a challenge for dealing with the hazardous air pollution in urban China with widespread impact on health, productivity and quality of life. It hasn't been long since Chinese people owned their own cars. So for them a car is something quite fresh and they prefer to drive after so many years of riding bicycles. They would prefer to enjoy the traffic jam rather than suffer on the crowded bus. Today, in China buying a car is like buying a bicycle. The subway train driver Gao Fei said, "To be honest, the more the air is polluted, the more I prefer to drive, as I don't like taking a crowded bus or walking outside in such bad air. The air pollution and smog in Beijing and Shanghai are sometimes so bad that the airports are shut down because of poor visibility. In January 2012, AFP reported: “ More than 150 flights to and from Beijing were cancelled or delayed as a thick cloud of acrid smog shrouded the city, with US figures saying the pollution was so bad it was off-the-scale”. Barbara Finamore, the director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's China program based in Beijing said, "When you get off the airplane, if you were to travel to Beijing, you would immediately feel your eyes stinging and your throat rasping" .The air quality of Beijing is 16 times worse than New York City. China should learn from cities like New York and Hong Kong. Sometimes people can't even see building a few blocks away and blue sky is a rare sight, and in Shanghai sometimes people can't see the street from the 5th floor window. Traffic has been backed up more than usual because of the low visibility, and several highways were closed. Parents have been keeping their children indoors. Residents have been racing to buy air purifiers, oxygen generators and face masks.

The third factors that pollute the air in China is industrial pollution from factories and construction. In recent years, the rapid industrial growth of China has placed increased pressure on the country’s natural environment. As the global factory's role, China is the biggest construction site in the world. Seventy percent of the global iron and steel, and about half of the world's cement is produced in China. China’s smog-filled cities are ringed with heavy industry, metal smelters, and coal-fired power plants, all critical to keeping the fast-growing economy as they spew tons of carbon, metals, gases, and soot into the air. Most lead poisoning is caused by pollution from battery factories and metal smelters. Demand for lead batteries in China is rapidly increasing due to expanding car, motorcycle, electric bike, telecommunications, and photovoltaic solar markets. China nowadays is the world’s largest manufacturer of lead batteries. From 2004 to 2010, lead battery production in China increased 133%. China now has some 2,000 factories and 1,000 battery-recycling plants. Since 2005, at least 27 serious mass lead poisoning incidents have been reported around lead battery manufacturing and recycling facilities throughout China. Most of these poisoning incidents occurred near Chinese manufacturing and recycling companies, but reports of lead poisonings have also emerged in the community adjacent to a plant owned by Johnson Controls(USA) in an area near Shanghai. Lead poisoning is a serious environmental and occupational health threat and lead battery production and recycling operations are now the most significant source of lead exposures in China. Many mass lead poisoning incidents have been reported in recent years around lead battery and manufacturing facilities in China. This toxic metal is then available for human absorption while airborne, before settling in dust and soil. Since 2005, at least 27 serious mass lead poisoning incidents have been reported around lead battery manufacturing and recycling facilities throughout China including six incidents during the first half of 2011. In one incident, at least 300 people living near a motorcycle and e-bike battery manufacturer in Zhejiang Province were found with blood lead concentrations that were up to seven times the acceptable limit. In September 2009, it was revealed that 121 children living near a battery plant in Fujian Province suffered from lead poisoning. Other clusters of leading poisoning have been found in other industrial areas. A hospital in Kunming found that 200 out of 1,000 children living near an industrial park there had elevated levels of lead in their blood according to the China Daily. In Shaanxi Province, 615 out 731 children in two villages near the Dongling lead and Zinc smelter tested positive for lead poisoning.

Coal, factories, vehicle are all the major factors that pollute the air in China, which in turn impacts public health. Birth defects such neural tube defects, additional fingers and toes, cleft pallets and congenital heart disease and mental retardation is one of the problem of the air pollution. In the U.S. for every 10,000 live births, there are 7.5 infants with neural tube defects. In Shanxi China, that number is 18 times higher. Shanxi is home to the world’s three most polluted cities. It also lead the world in the incidents of cleft palates and extra fingers among babies. Some parents whose children are born with extra toes cut them off so it is easier to buy shoes. Over a 10-year period, the researchers gathered placentas from 80 stillborn or newborn infants in Shanxi with the disorder. Based on their analysis, they confirmed that those infants had been exposed in utero to significant levels of pesticides, industrial solvents, and especially polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are released into the air when fossil fuels are burned. In Shanxi, abundant coal is used for power plants as well as for home cooking and heating. They found higher concentrations of the chemicals in the placentas of infants with the birth defects than in other infants. There is a clear association between the environment the mother is exposed to and birth outcomes.

Another problems due to pollution in China is pulmonary disease. The health effects of inhalation exposure to the byproducts of energy-related combustion are currently manifesting in Chinese children as indicated by rising levels of pulmonary disorders such as childhood asthma. The prevalence of childhood asthma among urban children rose by 64% during the 1990s. In bigger cities, where the air quality is worse, this figure is more than doubled. Most affected was Chongqing, one of the fastest growing metropolises in China, where the prevalence among children younger than 14 years was 4.63%. These statistics may be underreporting the true numbers of asthmatic children, because cultural preferences make it more likely for boys to receive medical care for their asthma than girls. The causal relationship between coal-burning emissions and increasing prevalence of asthma is supported by higher incidences of asthma-related symptoms and other pulmonary dysfunctions during the winter months when coal consumption is at its peak. Studies conducted in China by US academic institutions, and the US Environmental Protection Agency indicated that high levels of both indoor and outdoor air pollution from coal burning increase the risk of respiratory morbidity such as cough with phlegm, wheeze, asthma, and bronchitis in Chinese children. Moreover, the high levels of indoor air pollution in Chinese households have also been linked to an increased incidence of asthma in children. Research in Beijing has indicated that the indoor environment can be dangerous for asthmatic children because of the potential of combined exposure to particulates from cooking/heating, tobacco smoke, indoor molds and fungi, and allergens from dogs, cats, and vermin such as rats and cockroaches.

In addition, lungng cancer is also a caused by pollution. Nonsmoking women in an area of China’s Yunnan province die of lung cancer at a rate 20 times that of their counterparts in other regions of the country, and higher than anywhere else in the world. Coal in Yunnan’s Xuanwei County, where the problem exists, contains high concentrations of silica, a suspected carcinogen. There is more silica in this coal than in 99.9 percent of all others the samples. Like others in rural China, the families of Xuanwei County use coal for heat and for cooking. As the coal burns, particles of silica are released with the vapor and inhaled. Women, who do the cooking, face the greatest exposure. Dr. Qing Lan, an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Md., is completing two studies involving hundreds of women and families there. Her team is confident that coal burning is causing the high rates of cancer in this area.

Besides the impacts of public health, acid rain is also a solution of air pollution. Most acid rain in the province results from high concentrations of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide in the air. China is the world’s top producer of airborne sulfur dioxide. Levels of sulphur dioxide emissions in China are double what are regarded safe. Coal-burring power stations and coking plants are the main sulfur dioxide producers. One survey found that a third of mainland China is regularly soaked in acid rain and half of the cities and counties surveyed receive at least some acid rain. In some places every rainy day is an acid rain day and limestone buildings are dissolving in the acid air. The Guangdong-Guangxi-Guizhou-Sichuan basin south of the Yangtze is the largest single area in the world affected by acid rain pollution. A study in the early 2000s found that one third of crops in the Chongqing area had been damaged by acid rain. Furthermore, China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides disgorged by coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul and Tokyo, and much of the particulate pollution in Los Angeles comes from China. China, one of the worlds largest industrial powers, is now facing a difficult situation. The Chinese government, in fear that the country would fall in a recession, has not done much to stop these industries, so China has become the second largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world. If the air we breathe, the water we drink and the soil which produces our crops, vegetables and fruits, all become more and more impure, then our chances of good health and longevity will be very less and less. The topic of air pollution is not a new concern to the world; however, the effects of air pollution, especially to the million of people directly or indirectly harmed by the side effects of bad air, should be of grave concern. Chinese government and Chinese people should take actions now to protect their health and to decrease the number of death in China.

Work cited.

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