China Environmental Law

There have been additional stories about the vanadium oxide smelters in Hubei.  The most recent articles have focused on the ailments suffered by local farmers, but they have given a few extra details concerning how these smelters were dealt with from an administrative perspective.
In June of this year, the government got a “tip-off” that 10 [...]

[Read more →]

Yunnan Province isn’t wasting any time in seeking to remediate the arsenic pollution in Yongzonghai (阳宗海) which we reported on last month.  It has invited bids on a project which reportedly has two components (the news report has them slightly garbled; what follows is from the bid tender itself):  

Lower the average arsenic concentration in Yangzonghai from the [...]

[Read more →]

Hubei Province has been busy on the environmental enforcement front.  There are two stories out today about Hubei taking it to recalcitrant polluters.
First, Hubei Kexing Medical and Chemical Co. Ltd (”KMC”) was fined 200,000 yuan (about US$29,000) for discharging cyanide into the Hanjiang River, a major tributary of the Yangtze. 
Here are the facts: 

KMC was named one [...]

[Read more →]

We don’t want to leave the Heilongjiang Province cities out of our discussion of China’s top “environmentally satisfying” cities.  Two of the province’s urban areas made the all star, 90%+ satisfied list: Daqing (大庆) and Heihe (黑河).  They are located here: 
View Larger Map
Unfortunately, it was hard to find much information for either city as to [...]

[Read more →]

My last post focused on those Chinese cities blacklisted for poor environmental performance, but it also mentioned several cities where 90%+ of the population was “satisfied” with the local environmental protection efforts.  These cities belong on the gold star list.
They were concentrated in two provinces Shandong and Heilongjiang.  We’ll look at the Shandong cities today: [...]

[Read more →]

Think it’s bad where you are?  It could be worse.  The following Chinese cities have been singled out for disapprobation by the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) regarding their environmental records:
Bad Air:

Bayannur and Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia
Baiyin, Gansu
Urumqi, Xinjiang
Huanggang, Hubei

 Bad Water:

Hengshui and Cangzhou, Hebei
Linfen, Shanxi
Fuyang, Anhui
Tongchuan, Shaanxi
Wuwei, Gansu

If you’d like to know where these cities are, [...]

[Read more →]

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran an interview with Lenny Mendonca, the chairman of the Bay Area Council and a director of the San Francisco office of McKinsey & Co. Inc.  The Bay Area Council (BAC) “represents 275 of the largest employers in the region.”  “Green” tech and China consumed a large part of the [...]

[Read more →]

Correction: Has hell frozen over?  CELB has made an error.  We have just emerged from a strenuous self-criticism session, and have agreed to forgo this afternoon’s fourth Diet Coke.  In addition, we have been forced to correct our boo boo below.  We are not entirely to blame.  The Economic Observer Online (EOO) made a typographical [...]

[Read more →]

Now here’s something that could really make a difference.  China Daily reports that the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning (CAEP) is “mulling a plan to assess provincial environmental performances.”  The plan being considered is the Environmental Performances Index (EPI).
As we have previously noted, China has set performance criteria for local officials which considers how well [...]

[Read more →]

So what did you miss last week?  Not much.
Like the swallows to Capistrano
Beijing’s air quality seemed to return to pre-Olympian-effort murkiness or was it just another attack of haze?  No obfuscation this time, Xinhua calls it as it sees it: “smog.”
The reappearance of the smog was blamed on such factors as the lifting of some provisional [...]

[Read more →]