The Wages of Heavy Industry Is Death

China’s government rushed Thursday to shield the country’s southern business center, Guangzhou, from a toxic spill flowing toward the city of seven million—the second manmade disaster to hit a Chinese river in six weeks. As a slick of toxic benzene from the first accident in the north arrived in Russia, where worried residents flooded a telephone hot line, authorities in southern China were dumping water from reservoirs into the Bei River to dilute a cadmium spill from a smelter.

—Associated Press

China’s worst-polluting industries include paper and pulp, food, chemicals, tanning, and mining. Just on the banks of the Yangtze River alone, there are more than 9,000 chemical plants and tens of thousands more polluters of all shapes and sizes.

In some cases, small factories without adequate pollution-control technology wantonly dump a toxic stew of wastes and chemicals into rivers and streams. In other cases, large factories equipped with the latest and most sophisticated pollution-control technologies simply do not use the technologies for fear of driving up production costs—and without any fear of sanctions by lax regulators and often complicit local officials.

The most common toxic pollutants being unleashed include dioxins, solvents, and PCBs; various metals such as mercury, lead, and copper; and highly persistent pesticides ranging from chlordane and mirex to DDT. As noted by the Wall Street Journal:

The textile industry is one of China’s dirtiest. In addition to heavy metals and various carcinogens, fabric dyes may contain high levels of organic materials, and thread is often dipped in starch before it is woven into the fabric. The breakdown of large amounts of organic compounds, such as starch, can suck all the oxygen out of a river, killing fish, and turning the water into a stagnant sludge.

China’s waterways are not just turning fluorescent green from pond scum. They often run red, blue, or any one of a number of colors from the dyes regularly dumped from factories serving the most visible of multinational corporations—from the Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, and Reebok to Nike, Land’s End, and Abercrombie and Fitch. Notes the Wall Street Journal, there’s a joke in China today that “you can tell what colors are in fashion by looking at the rivers.”