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China Fights Pollution

China Fights Pollution image
Parent Issue
Day
4
Month
June
Year
1971
OCR Text

China Fights Pollution

Hong Kong--Dispatch News Service

The Chinese have embarked upon a massive campaign to reduce pollution.

But for an unusual reason. Peking insists that China as a poor country must utilize all its available resources -- including pollutants. "There is nothing in the world that is absolute waste." argues China's national newspaper, People's Daily. "Waste materials from one product can become good materials for other products.

In Shanghai, therefore, the gasses that used to spew from the chimneys of a giant oil refinery are instead channeled by line to a nearby chemical complex, to end up as synthetics, plastics, and medicines.

In the far north, Kirin City's major chemical plants likewise no longer despoil the environment with poisonous effuents. They go instead to a hundred neighborhood workshops specially set up to process the wastes into some 200 much needed industrial goods.

Everywhere in China, task forces of technicians and workers have been recruited to discover pollutants.

Small rural peasant-run enterprises have established even smaller plants to transform wastes into pesticides, while in Feking the enormous General Winery has almost doubled its facilities in order to process its residues within the distillery's gates.The Winery now supplements it's much-sought-after intoxicants with a dozen other product lines, including electronic elements and drugs.

Peking urges thrift in all matters. Chinese reports indicate most enterprises collect metal shavings and sawdust for reprocessing. Castoff iron buckets, cardboard, and wooden boxes are laboriously patched up and reused. In recent years, one cardboard repair shop has reportedly salvaged 16, 000 tons of boxes, saving the state more than two million dollars -- and sparing one forest for China.

The thrift pursued by China's technicians has transformed the construction industry---and as a by-product helped to save the Chinese environment. Thermal power plants annually discharged more than ten million tons of fly ash, China's greatest source of air pollution. But now ways have been devised to manufacture building blocks from the ash--which have proved twice the strength of ordinary bricks.

Because fly ash contains combustible carbon, the blocks bake themselves, reducing costs sharply. The blocks can be made of greater size, so buildings reportedly take less time to construct. Most of the new structures in the major cities now are composed of what was once industrial waste.

Apartment buildings and school houses are erected from iron slag, shale from coal mines, gypsum waste, and the cinders from boilers. As the hills of poisonous slag are used up, the ground has been reclaimed for agriculture.