Water Pollution in China
Water Pollution is a serious problem in China, and the entire population in China is threatened by this issue. However, this threat can be solved through the effort of both the people and the government. There are basically three aspects of serious water pollution in China. First, water pollution is a great threat to human health. Second, wastewater disposal is one of the largest causes that damage the water environment. Last but not least, although the government has already paid any attention to the sewage treatment industry, there are still many things need to be improved. All of those issues can be improved or be solved if both people and the government work together and try their best to protect the water environment.
Before going deep to the arguments, it is very important to define what is water pollution and understand the current situation of the water environment in China. Water pollution is the contamination in the water bodies and most of the water pollution is caused by human activity, such as industrial production and releasing household wastewater into the water bodies. There are many components under the general term of water pollution, including oil and the derivative of it, carbonic compounds, nutrients, heavy metals, and bacterias that grow in faeces of living organisms. All of those harmful components in water pollution can resolve in water and become a huge threat to the aquatic ecosystem. As a result, this will lead to a public health problem for people who live near water bodies. For instance, they may drink the polluted water from the polluted water and get sick or even die because of it. Melissa Denchak, a freelance writer and editor, writes in her journal article Water Pollution: Everything you need to know, which briefly defines water pollution and the threat of it. “Water pollution occurs when harmful substances — often chemicals or microorganisms — contaminate a stream, river, lake, ocean, aquifer, or other bodies of water, degrading water quality and rendering it toxic to humans or the environment.” (Denchak) Understanding what is water pollution, it is time to come into China and explore how serious the pollution in the water environment is in China. A professor at the University of East Anglia in Britain whose name is Dabo Guan has been doing research on the water problem in China for years. “He believes water pollution to be the biggest environmental issue in China, but the public may be unaware of its impact.” (Gibson) In fact, without being realized by the public, the water system in entire China has been polluted under the table by the urbanization and industrial activity of human. Almost the whole water system in China has already been polluted when people finally started realizing this issue. Now, nearly half of the population in China is not able to access clean water that is safe for human to use and around two-third of the rural people in China live on polluted water (Gibson). In 2012, Yale University has done an Environmental Performance Index of 132 countries in the world, and China is ranked 116 among the 132 “with respect to its performance on changes in water quantity due to consumption, including industrial, agricultural, and household use.” (Hays) Jonathan Kaiman, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, states that “The head of China’s ministry of water resources said last year that up to 40% of the country’s rivers are “seriously polluted”, and an official report from last summer found that up to 200 million rural Chinese have no access to clean drinking water.” in his journal posted in 2013 (Kaiman). This is how serious water pollution is in China.
One reason why water pollution in China is a serious problem is that it is a huge threat to the public health of people. First, drinking unclean water causes many types of diseases, such as bacterial and parasitic diseases, or even leads to death, especially in rural areas. According to the article from the Department of Zoology, University of Gujrat, Pakistan, water that is polluted by human or livestock’s faeces contains many bacterias and parasites in it and would cause people sick if they drink them without any treatment. “Many waterborne infectious diseases are linked with faecal pollution of water sources and results in the faecal-oral route of infection. Health risk associated with polluted water includes different diseases such as respiratory disease, cancer, diarrheal disease, neurological disorder and cardiovascular disease.” (Haseena 1(3):17) Diarrhoea is one of the most common diseases caused by drinking contaminated water. The main symptoms of it including fever, abdominal pain, and headache. Usual diarrhoea does not lead to death, but the circumstance is completely different when people get infected because drinking unsafe water. The bacterias from the polluted water destroy the immune system of human and may cause many other syndromes that kill people. There are nearly two-third of the rural population in China is not able to access to clean drinking water and live under the threat of bacteria diseases, which is the fact that people in China have to deal with. The second reason is that dirty water is an ideal environment for pests to grow, which is a source of the transmission of diseases. Many insects spawn in the water during their reproductive period, and the mosquito is a great example of this kind of insects. Most mosquitos lay their eggs in water, especially in stagnant water. Pools, laying rainfall, and mud are all common places where people can find the spawns of mosquitoes. When stagnant water is polluted by human and animal faeces, there is a higher chance that it becomes an ideal place for the reproduction of mosquitoes. Mosquitoes transmit viruses and diseases through the blood exchange when they bite living organisms. There are many diseases transmitted by them and some of these diseases are fatal to a human, such as malaria and yellow fever. Water pollution in China leads to a large number of mosquito reproduction, which then becomes a huge threat to public health in China. “Mosquito-borne diseases in China remain a serious public health problem. For example, 46,988 malaria cases and 18 deaths were reported in 1,097 counties in 2007. In 2002, the most serious outbreak of dengue fever occurred in Taiwan with 5,285 diagnosed cases. In 2006, an outbreak of Japanese encephalitis occurred in Shanxi Province causing 19 deaths.” (Bai) Reducing water pollution is the best way to reduce the number of mosquitoes in China, which will lower the threat that people being infected by Mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria. Third, heavy metals and petrochemicals from industrial water wastes cause damage to the nervous systems of human and even causes cancer. Toxic materials go into the water system with industrial water waste. Those heavy metals accumulate in aquatic animals and then goes into the human’s body as those animals being eaten by a human. As a result, the toxins accumulate in the human body and may cause many diseases. “Heavy metals contaminate surface and groundwater, resulting in deterioration of drinking water and irrigation water quality and can enter into the human food chain, posing a risk to human health.”(Adesiyan) For example, lead is one of the common heavy metals that people can find in the water pollution that seriously threats public health. The accumulation of lead in the human body can lead to a damage of the central nervous system, causing hair loss, liver cirrhosis, renal failure and neural disorder (Haseena 1(3):17). Besides lead, there are still many other harmful materials to human in water pollution, such as petrochemicals that can cause cancer and iron that creates “an iron clog in to fish gills and it is lethal to fishes when these fishes are eaten by human leads to the major health issue.” (Haseena 1(3):17) Those are all the serious impact of the heavy metal from water pollution on human, and reduce the disposal of them to the water system is the best way to prevent the threat.
After understanding the threat of water pollution, it is also necessary to identify the causes of pollution, in order to solve the problem efficiently. Waste disposal is one of the largest causes of water pollution in China. There are basically three main types of wastes being disposed into the water system and pollute the environment, including household and agricultural wastewater, industrial and mine wastewater, and plastic waste that is not decomposable. First, household and agricultural wastewater, also called sewage, are the top source of pollution in rivers and streams. Those two kinds of wastewater are produced by the daily lives and agricultural activity of human. Bacteria, viruses, and excess nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrate are common components that can be found in them. As stated above, bacteria and viruses pollute the water systems and threaten public health when people drink tainted water. However, excess nutrients are a larger threat to the environment itself than bacteria and viruses. “Nutrient pollution, caused by excess nitrogen and phosphorus in water or air, is the number-one threat to water quality worldwide and can cause algal blooms, a toxic soup of blue-green algae that can be harmful to people and wildlife.” (Denchak) An algal bloom is a serious threat to both human and aquatic ecosystem. The toxic substance in it damages the food chain and hurts the livers of human when it goes into human bodies. Due to the heavy household and agricultural wastewater disposal, algal bloom becomes a common phenomenon in China. Data shows the serious result of releasing untreated sewage into the water system. “The phenomenon has become an annual occurrence in the region over the past six summers. This year’s incident has swathed 28,900 sq km (11,158 sq miles), twice as much as the previous biggest bloom in 2008.” (Mathiesen) Besides the sewage, industrial water waste also contributes to the water pollution problem in China. Industrial water waste is produced by the industrial activity of human. Producing food, clothing, cars, and etc. are all industrial activities that dispose of industrial wastewater into the water system. This type of wastewater is the most complicated among all water pollution because there are so many different components within it. Both organic matters such as food residues and inorganic matters such as heavy metals and toxic chemicals can be found in industrial wastewater. Melissa Denchak indicates that “chemicals and heavy metals from industrial and municipal wastewater contaminate waterways as well. These contaminants are toxic to aquatic life—most often reducing an organism’s life span and ability to reproduce—and make their way up the food chain as predator eats prey.” (Denchak) These toxic substances accumulate in the bodies of aquatic animals and then becomes a part of the food chain. As a result, the public health of humanity is threatened as well, considering the top position of humanity in the food chain. Other large contaminants that pollute the water system in China are plastic waste. Plastic products are usually indecomposable by the environment, which means when plastic made items such as bottle and bags are thrown in the water system, they become contaminants that can keep threatening the environment for decades. “Throughout the very long lifespan of any given plastic product, the material may release various hazardous substances.” (Lant) As the largest producer and exporter of plastic in the world, China produces the most plastic wastes as well. Unfortunately, every year there are uncountable plastic wastes released into the water system and ocean in China. “China found an average of 24kg of floating waste per 1,000 square metres of surface seawater last year. Some 88.7 per cent of that was plastic, the ministry said. Plastic also dominated the waste found below the surface, including on the seabed.” (Baynes) Obviously, plastic has become one of the major pollutions that China needs to deal with.
It is true that the government of China has already paid a lot of attention to water waste treatment, there are still many things need to be improved. One thing that needs to be improved is the oversight of wastewater disposal. China has a very high standard of releasing wastewater, some of the standards are even higher than in Europe. However, the actual disposal does not match the standard. “Chemical manufacturing, textiles, coal, and industrial agriculture together account for about 50% of China’s industrial wastewater. Local governments rely heavily on these industries, and local regulators often turn a blind eye to illegal practices, which is public health and environmental hazard.” (Greenpeace East Asia) The failure of executing the standard creates millions of tons of water wastes being released into the water system in China, which has become a great threat to both public health and the environment. The government really need to improve the oversight on the wastewater disposal in order to protect the water environment. Second, the government really need to put more effort into building more wastewater treatment facilities. China has the world largest wastewater treatment system with the wastewater pipeline network “totals more than 414,000 km in length2, equivalent to more than 10x the Earth’s Equator at 40,075 km.” (Tan, Hu, & Lazareva) However, compared to the stupendous amount of wastewater, there is still a lack of wastewater treatment equipment in China. “In 2012, the total discharge of wastewater in the country amounted to 68.5 billion tonnes which are in volume terms comparable to the annual flow of the Yellow River of 58 billion m3 per annum.” (Tan, Hu, & Lazareva) An estimation from Beijing indicates that China still needs to build 400,000 km of wastewater piping in order to have to capacity to deal with all the wastewater in the country, which would probably cost one trillion RMB (Greenpeace East Asia). Other than building more facilities that are very costly and slow, improving the efficiency of the existing wastewater treatment facility is also an aspect that the government need to work on. The current utility of the wastewater treatment facility is very low, which creates a shortage in the wastewater treatment industry. There are nearly 83,227 installed wastewater treatment facilities in China at the end of 2015, with an estimated annual treatment capacity of around 90 billion tons, but “the actual amount of wastewater treated in 2015 is only about 44 billion tons” (Soh). This low utility of existing wastewater treatment facilities is one of the biggest problems that the government has to deal with.
Someone might have different ideas on this topic. One counter-argument is that the government’s plan and effort have already made a great improvement to the water environment in China. The Chinese government has spent billions of money building wastewater treatment facilities in the last ten years, and there is more than half of the wastewater in China today can be treated according to the disposal standards. “In the 13th FYP, China aims to spend around RMB 559 billion or 0.75 per cent of its GDP on its water treatment industry.” (Soh) There is no doubt that the government in China has already spent a lot of money and effort on the wastewater treatment programs, but it is still not a time for them to stop. Since water pollution is a huge threat to public health and the wastewater disposal is a major cause of it, reducing the discharge of wastewater should be the priority that the government deal with. They should keep working on this problem until the wastewater disposal matches the standards and does not pollute the environment anymore. Another counter-argument is that water pollution is an inevitable result of the development of China, and people should take the risk of it when they enjoy the benefits of the industrialization and urbanization. It is true that pollution is always a cost of industrialization and urbanization, but it should be controlled in an acceptable range through government regulation and oversight. However, the lack of government regulation and oversight in China are actually two factors that lead to serious water pollution today. For example, the Chinese government does not take the environmental effects of using fertilizer before they encourage farmers to use it and grow more crops. “Water pollution in China has doubled from what the government originally predicted because the impact of agricultural waste was ignored.” (Gibson) As a result, the water environment has been terribly damaged and the public health is under the threat of it. The negligence of the government is one of the causes that leads to this bad situation.
Water pollution is a very serious problem in China. The public health of people is threatened by the polluted water system, as people can get many types of diseases when they can not access to clean water or are under the threat of disease transmission because of the pests’ reproduction. There are many factors that lead to this terrible situation in China and waste disposal is one of the most important causes of it. The disposal of wastewater and plastic trashes both contribute to the harsh water pollution in China. Last but not least, there are still many things that the government can do to improve this situation, including enforcing the oversight on the wastewater disposal, building more wastewater treatment facilities, and improving the efficiency of existing facilities. As a conclusion, the serious water pollution in China can be solved if both people and the government work together.
Work Cited
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