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Chinese Environmental News

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The river sweats oil and tar, wrote TS Eliot – and often worse in China
Jul 31, 2009 (WiC 26)

It all started for Huo Daishan with photographs of dead fish. Huo was a newspaper photographer on an assignment at China’s Huai River. He remembered how blue the water was in his youth. Now a purplish foam covered the surface. Beneath it, ...

Unilever 1, the Vatican 0

Multinational’s carbon cops push for cleaner solution at its Chinese plant
Jul 31, 2009 (WiC 26)

Even the Vatican had given up on straw. Famously, news of the election of a new Pope was traditionally greeted with white smoke, aided by the throwing of straw on top of burning ballot papers. No longer, however, as the cutting edge Conclave ...

A backlash against foreign water companies
Jul 24, 2009 (WiC 25)

Legend has it that the founder of the Xia Dynasty – some 4,200 years ago – rose to power through an ability to “master the waters”. For 13 years Emperor Yu built waterworks to irrigate fields and prevent flooding. And as the historian ...

A load of rubbish

New “eco” incineration plants are proving controversial
Jul 3, 2009 (WiC 22)

The problem with rubbish is that there is no good way to get rid of it. Some readers will recall that we wrote an upbeat article in WiC6, that looked at how a host of Chinese cities were aiming to build new garbage incineration plants. These ...

Quenching Beijing’s thirst

Capital city plans world's biggest desalination plant?
Jun 19, 2009 (WiC 20)

In its long history, China has been defined by a simple commodity: water. Its civilisation grew out of its two major waterways: the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Irrigation projects – began over 2,200 year ago – helped to unite the ...

An electric shock

A new green bike may not be so green after all, Nanning discovers
Jun 12, 2009 (WiC 19)

The world’s best selling bicycle was supposed to inspire international peace, and was to be called the Flying Dove accordingly. But somewhere along the manufacturing line in early Maoist China it morphed into the Flying Pigeon. More ...

Bags of savings

Statistic of the week: China now uses 40 billion fewer plastic bags per year
Jun 5, 2009 (WiC 18)

A man dressed as Charlie Chaplin is on a mission. He waddles around the city of Zhengzhou twirling his cane and trying to persuade shoppers at a vegetable bazaar not to use plastic bags, writes the Henan Commercial News. When Chaplin (a local ...

A river runs through it

Jilin City is in the news again and not in a good way...
May 29, 2009 (WiC 17)

The city of Jilin’s tourism man must be tearing his hair out. His new tagline – “On the banks of the Songhua River” – looked like a good one, especially as Jilin already enjoys a reputation as the River City. The original tag dates back ...

How China could use a lot less electricity
May 15, 2009 (WiC 15)

On December 25, China gave the world a somewhat unusual Christmas present. The National Development and Reform Commission – the country’s top economic planner – announced that it had begun compiling plans to phase out the country’s use ...

Water, water, not everywhere

Polluting a reservoir in the interests of great television
May 8, 2009 (WiC 14)

Could a battle between the forces of Zhuge Liang and Cao Cao in 209 AD really cause a present day environmental disaster? It seems that it could. The disaster site was the Yangxi Reservoir in Zhejiang province, which was used by a TV crew to ...

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