Chinese pollution reaches our shores
China's contribution to the world is staggering. They have given us... Jackie Chan, Confucius, Sun Tzu, Zhang Ziyi... and now mercury pollution, on a massive scale. Scientists have discovered that pollutants laced with high mercury output are crossing the Pacific and settling on American plants, animals, lakes, streams, cropland, and everything we eat and drink.
From the Yale Global Online:
On a recent hazy morning in eastern China, the Wuhu Shaoda power company revved up its production of electricity, burning a ton and a half of coal per minute to satisfy more than half the demand of Wuhu, an industrial city of two million people. AES Corp., an American energy company, owns 25% of the 250-megawatt facility, which local officials call an "economically advanced enterprise."
The Chinese plant is outfitted with devices that prevent soot from billowing into the sky. But other pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and a gaseous form of mercury, swirl freely from the smokestacks. Rather than install more sophisticated and costly antipollution equipment, the plant, which is majority owned by state-controlled entities, has chosen to pay an annual fee, which it estimates will be about $500,000 this year. That option meets Chinese standards but wouldn't be allowed in the U.S.
The airborne output of Chinese power plants like Wuhu Shaoda was once considered the price of China's economic growth, and a mostly local problem. But just as China's industrial might is integrating the country into the global economy, its pollution is also becoming a global concern. Among the biggest worries: the impact of China's vast and growing power industry, mostly fueled by coal, on the buildup of mercury in the world's water and food supply.
Scientists long assumed mercury settled into the ground or water soon after it spewed forth as a gas from smokestacks. But using satellites, airplanes and supercomputers, scientists are now tracking air pollution with unprecedented precision, discovering plumes of soot, ozone, sulfates and mercury that drift eastward across oceans and continents.
Mercury and other pollutants from China's more than 2,000 coal-fired power plants soar high into the atmosphere and around the globe on what has become a transcontinental conveyor belt of bad air. North America and Europe add their own dirty loads to the belt. But Asia, pulsating with the economic rebirth of China and India, is the largest contributor.
"We're all breathing each other's air," says Daniel J. Jacob, a Harvard professor of atmospheric chemistry and one of the chief researchers in a recent multinational study of transcontinental air pollution. He traced a plume of dirty air from Asia to a point over New England, where samples revealed that chemicals in it had come from China.
One reason China's power industry spews out so much pollution is that under the nation's rules, many plants have the option of paying the government annual fees rather than installing antipollution equipment. Moreover, Beijing officials concede they lack the authority to shut down heavily polluting plants. And local inspectors, who don't report to Beijing, are reluctant to crack down on power companies that generate jobs.
In the U.S., the consequences are being detected not just in the air people breathe but in the food they eat. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently reported that a third of the country's lakes and nearly a quarter of its rivers are now so polluted with mercury that children and pregnant women are advised to limit or avoid eating fish caught there. Warnings about mercury, a highly toxic metal used in things ranging from dental fillings to watch batteries, have been issued by 45 states and cover four of the five Great Lakes. Some scientists now say 30% or more of the mercury settling into U.S. ground soil and waterways comes from other countries: in particular, China.
The increasingly global nature of the problem is rendering local solutions inadequate. Officials in some countries are using the presence of pollution from abroad "as an argument to do nothing [at] home," says Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program in Nairobi, Kenya.
Yet global remedies, primarily treaties, are even harder to achieve. The last such initiative, the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at limiting emissions related to global warming, was rejected by the U.S., the largest contributor of such emissions, and doesn't apply to China, the second-largest emitter. The best shot at a treaty for transcontinental pollution, Mr. Toepfer believes, would be to regulate a single pollutant that everyone agrees is hazardous. He recommends starting with mercury.
China is already believed to be the world's largest source of nonnatural emissions of mercury. Jozef Pacyna, director of the Center for Ecological Economics at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, calculates that China, largely because of its coal combustion, spews 600 tons of mercury into the air each year, accounting for nearly a quarter of the world's nonnatural emissions. And the volume is rising at a time when North American and European mercury pollution is dropping. The U.S. emitted about 120 tons of mercury into the air in 1999 from manmade sources. Chinese power plants currently under construction -- the majority fueled by coal -- will alone have more than twice the entire electricity-generating capacity of the U.K. (Bold added for emphasis.)
China's output of mercurial pollution is actually affecting health in the United States. Unlike global warming, this output is a provable fact, considering that modern technology allows us to track particulates and pollution footprints throughout the globe. The plumes of mercury-laced smoke emanating from China are appearing as far away as New England.
Admittedly, most of the mercury in the environment comes from natural sources. According to the EPA, a third of the mercury in the atmosphere gets there naturally. Traces of the silvery liquid in the earth's crust make their way into the sky through volcanic eruptions and evaporation from the earth's surface. It took the industrial age to turn mercury into a public-health concern. Mining, waste incineration and coal combustion emit the metal in the form of an invisible gas. After it rains down and seeps into wetlands, rivers and lakes, microbes convert it into methylmercury, a compound that works its way up the food chain into fish and eventually people.
But mercury in its "exportable" form comes from pollutants and from emissions, especially those emitters who choose to pay the fines rather than clean up their acts. So next time you want to blame the US for killing the world by not signing the Kyoto Protocols? Remember that the United States is not the instigator, nor are we the chief contributor, to mercury pollution. It's the Chinese.