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Environmental Problems in China

China’s Environmental Challenges

China’s rapid economic growth rate has long attracted worldwide attention. But few people consider the price at which these results are achieved.
Ordinary Chinese citizens have begun to realise the cost of this growth.
Industry in cities and their suburbs pollutes the air and the environment as a whole so severely that residents have had to use respiratory protection.

As a result, the country’s authorities recently adopted stricter measures to control the polluting impact of industrial production.

By November 2017, around 40% of factories had been closed for periods of up to several months for inspections. Electricity, gas and water supply to a factory is cut off while environmental inspectors check compliance with pollution standards.
Most factories had never been subject to such inspections before and were completely unprepared for them from a production standpoint. As a result, production schedules have been disrupted and supply chains broken, with all the consequences that follow.
For now, environmental inspectors are imposing fines and only resorting to criminal proceedings in special cases.

In 2016, environmental compliance checks were carried out in 30 Chinese provinces, after which more than 50,000 factories were closed. Officials in these provinces were fined or subjected to judicial investigation.

Impact on the global market:

On the global market, these measures will translate into economic instability now and reduced supplies of Chinese goods in the future.

For example, experts are already forecasting a multi-fold reduction in the production and export of urea. The same is expected for other export fertilisers — diammonium phosphate, magnesium sulfate and others. This may drive up prices for local alternatives.

Ultimately, compliance with production environmental standards will lead to higher prices across the entire range of chemical products.

Non-compliance with environmental standards is one of the reasons behind China’s rapid economic growth, achieved through cost savings.

The people of China do not want their rivers to run red or a constant smog to blot out the sun. For China, and for global ecology as a whole, this is a serious step towards improving the planet’s environmental climate.

But the effects of long-term pollution will continue to take their toll for a long time to come.

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