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Shanghai sets deadline to clean up rivers
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POLLUTED and smelly rivers are to be a thing of the past for Shanghai.
The city aims to clean up its rivers by the end of next year, Shanghai Vice Mayor Jiang Zhuoqing said yesterday.
The city’s water authority would continue to dredge polluted rivers, removing floating pollutants, building separate sewage and rainwater pipes, as well as demolishing illegal structures on the river banks, Jiang told legislators.
Nearly 1,000 dead-end rivers, prone to stinking, would be unblocked by the end of next year when cleaner water would be drawn to purify the rivers, he added. More trees would also be planted on the river bank to help to improve water quality.
“The city’s law enforcement teams will keep cracking down on illegal activities and whoever pollutes the rivers will face severe punishment,” he said.
About half the city’s surface water this year was heavily polluted or rated grade 5, said the urban construction and environmental protection commission of the Shanghai People’s Congress, the top legislative body of the city.
China classifies water quality into six grades. Grade 1 is potable after minimal treatment while grade 6 is severely contaminated.
Among 259 rivers surveyed earlier this year, 45 percent were rated at grade 5, while excessive nitrogen and phosphorus pollutants had been found in most rivers, the commission said.
In downtown, the city’s water authority found 56 “major black and smelly rivers”, of which 24 would be purified by the end of this year, while the rest would be treated by the end of next year, said Bai Tinghui, director of the water authority.
The city aims to ensure that rivers with grade 5 ratings — which stretch for more than 600 kilometers across the city — will be cleaned up by 2020. By then 78 percent of the rivers would meet the national water quality standard, Bai said.
“A major problem is many black and smelly rivers will turn back to being polluted shortly after the water authority tried to purify them,” said Xu Deming, a senior lawmaker with the commission.
To solve the problem for the long term, the water authority plans to build three major waste water treatment plants in Nanxiang in northwest Jiading District, Hongqiao in downtown Changning District and near Taihu Lake, which is on the upstream of the city’s Huangpu River around 2018, Bai said.
Furthermore, 240 kilometers of sewage pipelines would be built across Shanghai by 2020, when more than 95 percent of waste water would be collected and treated, he added.
The city also plans to cut the number of pigs being raised in the city as they are a cause of water pollution. The number is to be cut to 2 million from the current 3.8 million within four years.
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