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Toxic liquids dumped near Yangtze River

By WANG HONGYI CHINA DAILY
Updated: 2010-03-08 00:00

Beijing — An unlicensed recycling company dumped hundreds of barrels of toxic material near the Yangtze River, potentially threatening local water supplies.

Two men have been detained by police in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province.

In late January, police in Nanjing’s Jiangning district  received reports that more than 500 barrels filled with unknown substances were piling up on the banks of the Yangtze River near the Binjiang development zone. Police found black substances emitting heavy chemical smoke and killing surrounding plants.

Examination confirmed the substance included industrial liquid wastes, such as organic cyanide, ethers and organic chlorides. All the substances are toxic, belonging to a “national list of hazardous wastes”, which are dangerous to the human nervous system, and may seriously damage human skin.

“We didn’t know these things were so dangerous. Our company went bankrupt and we had no place to store them. So we moved them to the riverside,” one suspect surnamed Bo was quoted by the Yangtze Evening News.

So far, Bo and another suspect, surnamed Jiang, were detained for causing heavy environmental pollution.

The dump site was just several hundreds meters away from a water plant at the upper reaches of the river. Police said if the environmental protection department had not found the waste in time, the water plant as well as the local groundwater would have been polluted. And once the liquid waste got into the soil and spread, it would have been extremely difficult to remove.

The toxic substances were produced by chemical product manufacturing companies that sold them to unlicensed recycling companies.

“We didn’t know they (recycling company) dumped this industrial waste on the banks of the river until the environmental protection department came to ask us,” a man surnamed Xie was quoted as saying by the Nanjing Morning Post. Xie’s company sold 240 barrels of industrial waste to the private waste recycling company for 700 to 800 yuan ($100 to $115) per ton.

An official from the environmental protection department said such dangerous waste, which is generated in the process of industrial production, cannot be casually disposed of.

The 500 barrels of chemical waste have already been transferred to a professional waste disposal company for treatment.