Mass quantities of air pollutants from China, including mercury discharged from traditional coal-fired power plants, are travelling to places as far away as the US, according to the US environment agency.
“That is the most direct impact [of China’s pollution] on the United States,” Stephen Johnson, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, told the FT. Mr Johnson said the EPA had traced high levels of “mercury deposition” in the US to China and India. Mercury is a highly-toxic heavy metal that damages the human nervous system.
China’s neighbours, and even countries several thousand miles away, are growing wary that the country’s frenetic industialisation is creating more serious cross-border environmental problems.
Mr Johnson, who met with counterpart Zhou Shengxian of the State Environmental Protection Administration (Sepa) on his trip here, said China’s airborne chemicals and particulate matter were being detected on both coasts of the US.
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“Pollution – especially mercury pollution – knows no international borders,” he told health officials in the capital.
According to research compiled by the United Nations, some 53 per cent of the world’s natural and human-caused mercury emissions come from Asia, while Africa is a distant second with 18 per cent. Between 4,400 and 7,500 metric tons of the metal are emitted around the world every year, though these estimates are uncertain, the EPA warned.
US and Chinese officials have been discussing the airborne mercury issue with greater frequently since late 2005. As part of a broad environmental agreement reached last November, the EPA has been assisting the Chinese conduct mercury emission inventories on its polluters.
Mercury levels in China’s skies and waterways can be worryingly high. The metal tends to accumulate in living tissue, for instance in animals that are eaten by people. If the metal enters the food chain, the consumption of mercury-tainted fish can cause birth defects, child development problems and possibly even cancer.
One survey earlier this year of water sources in eastern Jiangsu province, where there is a concentration of manufacturers, found that various heavy metals - including mercury, cadmium and lead - were present in 41 per cent of fish species.
While commending China’s efforts in controlling sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from its power plants, Mr Johnson noted that much closer Sino-US cooperation was needed to control the most dangerous emissions. “Much work is to be done,” he said.
Mr Johnson said China’s cement kilns, which account for around 40 per cent of global production, are becoming major sources of dioxin and furan which, like mercury, can be transported airborne across long distances. He labelled them “some of the most toxic pollutants known to man”.
Toxic emissions, such as sulphur dioxide, from power plants are also causing acid rain in many regions. China’s middle and eastern regions have suffered badly from acid rain in the last decade, but the substances can cause acid rain far beyond the country’s borders. China has admitted the amount of sulphur dioxide emitted by its coal power stations was likely to rise significantly this year.
Mr Johnson said US environmental firms were eager to share cutting-edge pollution control technologies with China. The EPA this week inked an agreement with Sepa on handling hazardous waste.
“Just as America has in the past, China has typically evaluated its national progress largely on the sole basis of economic growth,” he said in a speech to students at Tsinghua University, the premier engineering school.
