Liaoning Will Shut Down Over 200 Small Paper Making Plants This Year

Liaonig Providence, which is located in the southern part of China’s northeast region and borders the Bohai Sea and the Yellow Sea, announced tomorrow (March 5) that is will shut down more than 200 small paper plants along the Liaohe River basin (the 7th major river basin in China) during 2008 (ChinaCSR.com, www.chinasourcingnews.com/.../04/01161-liaoning-will-shut-down-over-200-small-paper-making-plants-this-year/ ). Removing the “stinky smell from 10 branches of the Liaohe River over the next three years” is another goal.

Since there are several heavy industry cities along the river and more than 1,000 of those industries qualify as “big polluter enterprises”, this part of China’s geography is ranked as the “most seriously-polluted…among all the river basins in China.” Closing 200 paper mills and getting rid of the stinky smell is just the beginning. Fortunately, seven other industries - metallurgy, chemical, medicine, petroleum, nonmetal mining and textile – are also targeted for modification. The article does not indicate how, but Wang Bingjie, director of Liaoning Provincial Environment Department, announced that closing the paper-making plants would eliminate about 400,000 tons of backward production capacities.” By “straightening out a batch of major polluters” the provincial environmental department expects “that the 10 seriously-polluted branches of the Liaohe River would eventually become clean.”

Contrast that statement with PetroChina’s announcement (PetroChina to build 10-mln-ton capacity refinery in Huludao in ... ) that it plans to build a 10-million-ton capacity refinery in Huludao in northeastern China's Liaoning province. PetroChina is the China’s top oil and gas producer, spewing greenhouse gases into the air and metal deposits into the water, although a recent U.S. EPA analysis concluded that in the United States the “risks to human health and the environment posed by oil refinery emissions were low enough to warrant no further regulations” (www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/epa_lets_ignore.php). Perhaps emissions during refinery have no affect on the environment after all.