China Environmental Law

Greenpeace issued a report several weeks ago, during my hiatus, that I have just had an opportunity to review.  Poisoning the Pearl is based on the results of wastewater samples conducted by Greenpeace investigators of several facilities operating in the Pearl River Delta.  The results were discouraging, but predictable.

All the facilities sampled were found [...]

[Read more →]

You may have read about the water contamination case in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province.  If not, Greenlaw and New Energy and Environment Digest (NEED) have good summaries.  NEED states that
An estimated one million of the city’s 1.5 million residents were left without water due to what government identified as the presence of two variants of carbolic [...]

[Read more →]

I am not going to write anything today because you must read this article from Caijing Magazine: Heavy Metal Warfare.  It covers the smelting industry along the Xiang river in Hunan province 1 the , and in the process provides a telling picture of the challenges faced by Chinese environmental regulators across the vast rural [...]

[Read more →]

I know its hard to keep the incidents of environmental poisonings straight in China. Today’s post involves the more than 300 children living in the shadow of a lead and zinc smelting facility in Fengxiang county, Shaanxi province who have been reported with levels of lead in their blood so high they were exhibiting symptoms [...]

[Read more →]

There have been two “firsts” recently reported in the  China environmental litigation arena.  It is easy to get the two cases confused because the plaintiff in both is the All-China Environmental Federation (ACEF).
The ACEF is listed on the Ministry of Environmental Protection’s website as an “affiliated social organization” It was established on April 22, 2005 and [...]

[Read more →]

I applaud China’s willingness to publish the results of environmental and energy audits when the results do not paint a pretty picture.  The National Audit Office (NAO) yesterday released a report containing the results of its audit of the compliance efforts of 41 major state-owned enterprises (SOE) in 2007.  It found that a number of [...]

[Read more →]

Hats off to Zhou Shengxian, the Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP)!  He has always been fairly outspoken and frankly critical of local implementation of national environmental laws and policies, but his comments today in an interview with China Daily reveal a new level of commitment to China’s environment, and a candor not often [...]

[Read more →]

This one probably falls more into the “how not to hold a press conference” category, but it does have an environmental angle so will cover it here. (h/t and thanks to environmental attorney Sabrina Wang and, seperately, The Wu Way 無為 for bringing this story to my attention).
Heilongjiang Province’s Environmental Bureau (EPB) held a meeting with specifically [...]

[Read more →]

China Daily reported yesterday that random inspections by the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) in February revealed the following:

about 15.5% of projects started construction without approval (I assume this means that they either did not conduct an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) or their EIA was not approved);
about 9.6 %of enterprises closed for environmental reasons resumed [...]

[Read more →]

The  Chengcheng Chemical Co. Ltd., a sulfuric acid plant began illegally dumping arsenic contaminated waste water into the Dasha River’s in China’s Henan Province in late July of last year.  The regulatory authorities discovered that the river was contaminated by arsenic on August 26, 2008, and began to take corrective action, including constructing a series [...]

[Read more →]