Flood Of Toxic Paper Mill Waste Submerges Chinese Village - NYT

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URAD QIANQI, China — Dark as soy sauce, perfumed with a chemical stench, the liquid waste from two paper mills overwhelmed the tiny village of Sugai. Villagers tried to construct a makeshift dike, but the toxic water swept it away. Fifty-seven homes sank into a black, polluted lake. The April 10 industrial spill, described by five residents of the village in Inner Mongolia, was a small-scale environmental disaster in a country with too many of them. But Sugai should have been different. The two mills had already been sued in a major case, fined and ordered to upgrade their pollution equipment after a serious spill into the Yellow River in 2004.

The official response to that spill, praised by the state-run news media, seemed to showcase a new, tougher approach toward pollution — until the later spill at Sugai revealed that local officials had never carried out the cleanup orders. Now, the destruction of Sugai is a lesson in the difficulty of enforcing environmental rules in China.

“The smell made me want to vomit,” one villager said recently, as he showed the waist-high watermark on the remains of his home. There is no shortage of environmental laws and regulations in China, many of them passed in recent years by a central government trying to address one of the worst pollution problems in the world. But those problems persist, in part, because environmental protection is often subverted by local protectionism, corruption and regulatory inefficiency.

Even as many domestic and international environmental groups now credit China with beginning to take the environment seriously, pollution is actually worsening in some crucial categories. Emissions of sulfur dioxide, the building block of acid rain, rose by 27 percent between 2000 and 2005; government projections had called for a 20 percent reduction.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/world/asia/04pollution.html?_r=1&oref=slogin