Some passages worth highlighting from the article are as follows:
ZHOUTIE, China — By autumn, the stench of Lake Tai and the freakish green glow of its waters usually fade with the ebbing of the summer heat, but this year is different. Standing on a concrete embankment overlooking a fetid, floating array of plastic bottles, foam takeout containers, flip-flops and the occasional dead fish, Wu Lihong, the lake’s unofficial guardian, shook his head in disgust.
“If you jumped into this water, you’d shed a layer of skin,” he said one recent afternoon. “The government claims they are cleaning up the lake, but as you can see, it’s just not true.”
Seven years after a toxic algae bloom forced millions of people who depended on the lake to find alternative sources of drinking water, Lake Tai, which straddles two provinces in the Yangtze River delta, remains a pungent symbol of China’s inability to tackle some of its most serious environmental problems.
Since the 2007 crisis, which drew widespread domestic news media coverage and prompted a special meeting of the cabinet, the government has spent billions of dollars cleaning up the lake, the country’s third-largest freshwater body.
But environmentalists say it has little to show for the money. Hundreds of chemical plants, textile mills and ceramics workshops continue to dump their noxious effluent into the waterways that feed into Lake Tai.
The experiences of both Lake Tai and Mr. Wu speak volumes about the Chinese government’s often contradictory approach to environmental protection. Confronted by public anger over contaminated air, water and soil, the ruling Communist Party has sought to shutter obsolete steel mills, restrict the number of license plates available to big-city drivers, and recalibrate the economic-growth-at-all-costs criteria used to evaluate local officials. This year, Prime Minister Li Keqiang “declared war” on pollution in a speech to the national legislature.
But some local officials oppose policies they fear could close factories and eliminate jobs. They also prefer to deal with environmental problems their own way, if at all, which is why Mr. Wu ran into trouble with officials in Jiangsu, a relatively wealthy slice of coastal China that has prospered from its fecund, well-watered landscape but even more from industrial development, which has fouled the region’s rivers and canals.
That summer, shortly before he was put on trial, the industrial effluent flowing into Lake Tai from the 2,000 factories in the region reached a tipping point, prompting the algae bloom that forced officials in the nearby city of Wuxi to cut off water to two million residents.
Under the glare of a national spotlight, Jiangsu officials said they would spend more than $14 billion to clean up the lake and vowed to address the problem of toxic algae blooms within five years.
But the money, government researchers acknowledge, has had a negligible impact. According to the Lake Tai Basin Authority, 90 percent of water samples taken from the lake this summer were considered so toxic that contact with human skin was ill-advised. Wuxi, in the meantime, has found an alternative source for its drinking water.
In a recent interview with Xinhua Daily, Zhang Limin, deputy director of the Lake Tai Water Pollution Prevention Office, said the flood of contaminants had begun to level off, although it is still more than three times as much as the lake can absorb without killing most aquatic life.
Flushing the lake with water from the Yangtze River has improved water quality somewhat, though critics say it simply pushes pollution further downstream. These days, many polluters have built pipelines to centralized waste-treatment plants that are incapable of handling the flow. Others simply pipe waste directly into waterways through underground conduits that allow them to avoid detection.
But environmentalists say there is reason for hope. In April, the central government revised the nation’s environmental law for the first time since 1989, imposing steep fines on polluters and requiring companies to disclose pollution data. The regulations, which take effect in January, will also allow environmental groups to file public interest lawsuits against factories that break the law.
Pollution of the lake has been ongoing for decades despite efforts to reduce pollution that were not sustained and thus proved ineffective. In the 1980s and 1990s the number of industries in the lake region has tripled, while the population also increased significantly. One billion tons of wastewater, 450,000 tons of garbage and 880,000 tons of animal waste were dumped in the shallow lake in 1993 alone. The central government intervened and initiated a campaign to clean up the lake, setting a deadline to comply with pollution standards. When the deadline was not met, 128 factories were closed on New Year's Eve in 1999. Compliance improved somewhat afterwards, but the pollution problem remained severe.[7] In May 2007, the lake was overtaken by a major algae bloom and by major pollution with cyanobacteria.[8] The Chinese government called the lake a major natural disaster despite the anthropogenic origin of this environmental catastrophe. With the average price of bottled water rising to six times the normal rate, the government banned all regional water providers from implementing price hikes.[9] The lake provides water to 30 million residents, including about one million in Wuxi.[10] By October 2007 it was reported that the Chinese government had shut down or given notice to over 1,300 factories around the lake. However, Wu Lihong, one of the leading environmentalists who had been publicizing the pollution of the lake, was sentenced to three years in prison for alleged extortion of one of the polluters,[8] but, undeterred, alleged in 2010 that not a single factory was closed.[11] Jiangsu province planned to clean up the lake,[12] and chaired by Wen Jiabao the State Council set a target to clean Lake Tai by 2012.[13] However, in 2010 The Economist reported that a fresh pollution outbreak had occurred, and that Wu, released from prison in April, was claiming that the government was trying to suppress news of it, all the while switching to other supplies in place of lake water.[14]
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From the sources above it seems like everything tried thus far has failed and this is where CLQ comes into the picture. Through their tie-up with SIDRI they have the political and commercial connections to go with their unique, ground-breaking technology to make a real difference in some of the highest profile water pollution crises China has, crises that continue not only to create uncomfortable problems for governments of all levels throughout China, but headlines and stories that make the front page of The International New York Times as this article did on Saturday shaming the Chinese Government and causing international embarrassment for them, something the ruling elite hates.
Furthermore the problem is only going to get worse if things continue they way they have been, but thanks to the agreement between SIDRI and CLQ the future looks much brighter than the present for China and its environment as governments and government authorities country-wide start to get serious about cleaning up their environment under increasing domestic and international pressure.
The local government spent $14bn cleaning up Lake Tai in what was ultimately a futile attempt. If $14bn is being spent to clean up a single lake in China it demonstrates the size of the opportunities for CLQ, a market that doesn't appear to have any answer to its pollution problems and have been forced to turn to the likes of CLQ with the technology China needs to help it clean up its environment.
CLQ Price at posting:
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