News l Hazardous Waste in China

China is belatedly confronting a crisis of heavy metals poisoning after years of allowing manufacturers to disregard safety standards. The country has reported hundreds of pollution emergencies in recent years, many involving lead and various toxins from chemical and electronics factories.

The situation in Qujing and many other cases reflect "widespread inadequacies in handling and disposal of hazardous waste in the country and pose a threat to public health," Ministry of Environmental Protection deputy director Zhang Lijun Zhang said in comments published on the environment ministry's website.


Zhang said that companies that handle chromium, polycrystalline silicon used in solar cells, sewage sludge and electronic waste will be receive special scrutiny.In some forms, chromium is toxic and carcinogenic.

The Qujing case caused widespread alarm after the chromium dumped by Yunnan Luliang Chemical Industry in June killed livestock and tainted rivers supplying drinking water for cities in the heavily populated Pearl River Delta.

The chemical plant in Qujing has more than 140,000 tons of chromium slag stockpiled at the plant, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.

According to the latest available government figures, China produced 45.7 million tons of hazardous waste in 2007, with the amount expected to increase by 5 percent to 7 percent a year in 2011-2015, the state-run newspaper China Daily reported.

Zhang put the amount receiving appropriate treatment at less than 20 percent of the total, it said.China's environmental regulators have said they are determined to clean up contamination of the soil and water supplies from factories scattered across the country — a pernicious side-effect of the concentration of so much of the world's industrial production in China.