Disposal of chemical contaminants into groundwater: viewing hidden environmental pollution in China
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INTERNATIONAL VIEWPOINT AND NEWS
Disposal of chemical contaminants into groundwater: viewing hidden environmental pollution in China Dongfeng Li • Qiting Zuo • Guotao Cui
Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Following its growing economy for the last 30 years, China is struggling with a severe environmental crisis. As worsening air pollution has drawn the close attention of the international community, other national environmental pollution problems cannot be ignored. Now, Chinese residents are focusing on groundwater pollution. During the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday 2013, a post on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo exposed that chemical plants and paper mills in Weifang City, Shandong Province in North China have been discharging untreated wastewater underground to avoid supervision by the authorities (Xinhua News Agency 2013). This post attracted media attention and raised widespread domestic concern that launched a public campaign against groundwater pollution. A nearly weeklong untransparent investigation from local government revealed that Web reports about pollutions were false. Although the masses cannot come up with solid evidence to prove the existence of the groundwater pollution, the fact remains that the issue of illegal dumping to groundwater is not a new one and has been reported to exist in certain areas of China. For instance, a massive cadmium spillage in southwest China’s Guangxi province in January 2012 was caused by a mining company pumping chemical waste directly into the underground (Fig. 1). That company used a sewage outlet that was a 10-meter-deep hole with a diameter of slightly over a meter in which wastewater flowed into an underground river. As a result, cadmium concentrations moved with the flowing groundwater (Blowes 2002). More than 20 tons of toxic chemicals
D. Li Q. Zuo (&) G. Cui College of Water Conservancy and Environment, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450001, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected]
spilled into the Longjiang River, disrupting water supplies to downstream cities of 3.7 million residents. Currently China is facing a groundwater crisis. With about 20 % of the world’s population but only about 5–7 % of global freshwater resources, the water resource shortage becomes a major problem and China draws heavily on groundwater (Qiu 2010). Groundwater is used to irrigate more than 40 % of China’s farmland and roughly 70 % of Chinese get their drinking water from it. In the meantime this percentage is higher in rural areas (Mascarelli 2012; Qiu 2011). However, the economic boom of the past few decades associated with environmental degradation has tainted a great majority of that supply. In southern and southeastern China, groundwater is now laden with heavy metals and other pollutants discharged from industrial, agricultural, and domestic sources. Ninety percent of China’s shallow groundwater is polluted and an alarming 37 % is so foul that it cannot be treated for use as drinking water. The toll is significant: every year, an estimated 190 million C
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