Chinese Ministry of Environment Found Widespread Pollution Cover-Ups

Editorials News | Jun-07-2019

Chinese Ministry of Environment Found Widespread Pollution Cover-Ups

In China, local governments have been making reports on environment, supporting companies hide illegal dumping and cheating central government inspectors, as per the report by the country's Ministry of Environment.

The ministry says that last year it discovered thousands of violations of environmental regulations in ten provinces. On May 16, the ministry published a summary of these findings and of the attempts of local governments to repair their actions. The summary also says that the ten provinces that have provinces have since moved on to clean up environmental disasters.

China has been trying to reduce its environmental damage and promote initiatives to preserve its biodiversity. But the findings show that the country has a long way to go to clean contaminated air, water and soil, an objective of President Xi Jinping.

In Anhui, one of the ten provinces investigated by the ministry, manufacturers of artificial diamonds allegedly discharged sewage and hazardous solid waste. But before the inspectors went to investigate, officials warned the manufacturers about the inspections, according to documents that the Anhui government published earlier this month. In some cases, officials even instructed companies to forge waste disposal contracts, clean a trench contaminated with wastewater and temporarily suspend production to comply with regulations, the documents said.

False statements

Also, in Anhui, officials in the city of Wuhu claimed in August 2017 that complaints had been resolved that a particular company was illegally disposing of solid waste. In fact, the company did not even begin to address the problem until a year later, meanwhile, officials helped the company hide the illegal waste of the inspectors, according to Anhui government documents.

In other cases, local officials would routinely falsify documents to cover up their negligence, according to the ministry. A local government in the city of Zunyi, in the province of Guizhou, in the south of the country, produced notes, which are required according to the country's regulations, for ten meetings that never happened.

The ministry summary evaluated the ten provinces on how they have addressed such problems since the investigations. For example, the province of Shanxi has fined the polluters with some 24 million yuan (US $ 3.5 million) and set out to solve 1,463 violations of environmental regulations. The ministry called these "positive results."

The province of Hunan has ordered 4,326 companies to change their practice and has handed out fines of 80 million yuan.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01661-1


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