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Environment

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Chemical reaction

Deadly explosion shakes Jiangsu
Mar 29, 2019 (WiC 446)

What will it take to end China’s terrible record of chemical accidents? That’s what many were asking in the wake of a powerful explosion in Jiangsu’s Yancheng city last week which killed 78 and injured another 550. Even the government ...

Noxious neighbours

A chemical spill in Fujian casts nearby fishing villages into crisis
Nov 30, 2018 (WiC 434)

Before the district of Quangang in Fujian province emerged as a hub for refining petrochemicals many of the locals made their livings by fishing. Once the refinery opened, it was an uncomfortable coexistence. Tankers queued up next to edible ...

Farmers’ crops destroyed in huge Shandong flood
Aug 31, 2018 (WiC 422)

The world deadliest dam disaster happened in 1975 when Henan’s Banqiao Dam collapsed, killing 26,000 people (according to official figures; others estimate as high as 170,000). The government called it a “natural disaster”, citing the ...

The tyranny of trash

Authorities flag plan to help cities escape a ‘garbage siege’
Jul 27, 2018 (WiC 419)

Online shopping, meal delivery services and takeaway drinks. As consumer trends change in China, so does the amount of garbage that the country produces. With rubbish dumps starting to encircle many of the nation’s major cities, the ...

Cockroaches to solve China’s kitchen waste problem?
Jul 27, 2018 (WiC 419)

The Chinese produce some 60 million tonnes of kitchen waste a year. Some of it is burnt, some is composted, but most ends up in landfills where it threatens to morph into toxic sludge as it mixes with other types of garbage. Chinese farmers ...

Valuable rubbish

New crackdown on smuggling waste into China
Jun 8, 2018 (WiC 412)

Che Zhongqing can tell you a thing or two about the price of rubbish. For more than 10 years she has collected waste paper, plastic and metals from households in northeast Beijing. She keeps the figures for different goods in different years in ...

Green beginnings

State broadcaster takes on state chemicals firm
May 4, 2018 (WiC 407)

On April 16 the Chinese government officially launched its new Ministry of Ecology and Environment – a larger, more powerful version of the former Environmental Protection ministry. The next day, state broadcaster CCTV aired a 30-minute ...

Is China planning on a 1,000km tunnel to turn Xinjiang into California?
Nov 24, 2017 (WiC 389)

Since the mid-1800s Chinese scholars have dreamed of bringing water to Xinjiang and making the desert bloom. The first was Lin Zexu, an imperial official who was banished to the arid western region during the First Opium War; later came Zhu ...

Delivery firms try to cut down on waste boxes from online sales
Nov 10, 2017 (WiC 387)

In July JD.com celebrated its birthday in the usual way: running a sales campaign on its website to rival Alibaba’s Singles’ Day. According to China Daily, it sold 700 million items during the sales spree. But as we reported in WiC347, a ...

A load of old rubbish

News of China’s ban on trash imports ripples around the globe
Oct 6, 2017 (WiC 383)

Wang Jiuliang has made a reputation for himself as a producer of documentaries: his films are some of the quickest to go viral in social media but also the first to be purged by Chinese censors. Take Plastic Kingdom, a 2014 ...

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