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SCMP Reporter

While rich delta cities can  afford expensive cleanups, poor upstream provinces continue to pollute the Pearl River

Pearl River Delta cities are rich enough to start cleaning up the  mess they have made of the river, but experts warn the problem is moving upstream as poorer inland provinces  attract more polluting industries.

The  Pearl River dumps 8,655 tonnes of heavy metals, 65,637 tonnes of nitrates and ammonia, and 59,853 tonnes of petrol into the sea each year, according to the National Marine Environmental Monitoring Centre. The pollution threatens to turn the river mouth into the mainland equivalent of the Dead Sea.

Cities such as Guangzhou can afford to start building waste-water treatment plants,  but they have no control over polluters upstream or downstream.

'Guangzhou's efforts will go to waste if nothing is done upstream,' warned Liu Chen ,  a director of the Pearl River Water Resources Commission's protection bureau.

Protecting a water source meant setting some limits on development, Mr Liu said, citing the case of people living along the Dongjiang, where water is drawn to supply Hong Kong.

'They have had to make a lot of sacrifices to keep the river clean,' he said. 'Many projects are not approved for the sake of protecting the river, while downstream others make money by selling water to Hong Kong.'

As the mainland's level of environmental awareness grows, there  is growing recognition  that poorer inland provinces have a role to play in keeping rivers clean, but the economic issues have not yet been addressed.

'Many suggestions have been made to compensate [backward provinces], but they have not been implemented,' said Mr Liu.

Rich cities close to the coast  do not offer assistance to poorer inland provinces because they do not believe the problem is  serious.

Upstream, the water quality is still good and the release of clean water in January to push back salt water tides invading the delta only helped to lull people downstream into a sense of complacency.

'People are not worried but we are, because we have to plan for the future,' Mr Liu said. 'If we continue to pollute the water at its source, all the efforts of cities downstream  will be wasted.

'We should consider  some kind of mechanism to compensate the backward provinces like giving them tax breaks. We are also setting up a waste water discharge rights system so  people know what [type of] waste and how much of  it they can discharge into the river.'

One problem with conserving the Pearl River is that the commission does not have the  authority to deal with the four provinces  the river flows through. It will conduct a survey  of waste water discharge outlets along the Pearl River and its tributaries next month  but it cannot enforce the 2002 Water Law that regulates waste water discharge.

The Pearl River is not as polluted as some rivers in the north,  but there are stretches in the delta and in Guizhou  and Yunnan  where the water quality is as bad as in the notorious Huaihe.

Residents and factories in the delta are responsible for more than half the pollution that finds its way out to sea, pouring 10.1 billion tonnes of human and industrial waste into the river system a year.

The Nanpanjiang in Yunnan is also heavily polluted by industrial and human waste.

On the periphery of the Pearl River basin,  the Little Dongjiang  is polluted by an oil refinery in Maoming , while heavy population density and unregulated cottage industries are fouling the waters in Jieyang  and Chaoyang .

The state of the Shenzhen River is so appalling that a shocked water resources minister, Wang Shucheng  , ordered an immediate cleanup last year.

Shenzhen's problem is acute because it cannot build sewage plants and pipes fast enough to keep up with population growth, experts say.

The problem is compounded by low water volume so that even if the effluent discharged into the river met standards, the  amount is so great that the concentration of pollutants goes up.

Mr Liu said that it was possible to tackle the problem by raising the effluent standard, but that needed more investment and, rich as it was, Shenzhen could not yet afford to spend the extra money.



Putting a brake on torrents of filth