Smelter waste poisons farmers

By Yang Lifei  |   2008-10-16  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

THE legal representatives of four smelting plants in Hubei Province have been detained after more than 1,000 farmers were diagnosed with skin ailments due to pollution from the factories.

More than 1,000 farmers in Jianli County have suffered severe rashes and other skin ailments since March, when local industrialists and their counterparts from nearby Hunan Province opened plants to smelt the highly profitable alloy vanadium, Changjiang Times reported.

Local environmental authorities tried to stop the illegal plants from operating in 2006, but their efforts largely failed as the plants reopened.

An inspection team of Hubei environmental, health and supervision officials arrived in Jianli, 200 kilometers from provincial capital Wuhan, on Tuesday afternoon.

There are 10 vanadium smelting plants in Jianli, six of which have been closed again since September. The other four plants had defied the government ban until yesterday, when they were shut down, the report said.

The bank accounts of the four smelting plants have also been frozen, Lin Zhixiong, deputy director of Jianli County, told the newspaper.

The smelting plants discharged waste containing toxic cadmium and arsenic into waterways which led to the pollution of both water and farms.

The contaminated water also spread to several villages and polluted tens of thousands of hectares of fields.

Lin said the wastewater discharged by one of the plants near the Jiangxintai Village contained vanadium 209 times above the national standard.

"The plants were found to have caused pollution to the air and river to different extents in the past few months. They discharged the wastewater and gas directly without any treatment," Lin said.

"We can only leave the cotton to rot now," a local farmer told the Hubei-based newspaper. "Once we get in the field, we become itchy everywhere. Our skin even swells up and becomes rotten."