Hello everyone, thank you for giving me the chance to give this seminar.
My name is Jack and I'll be talking about the Chinese environmental remediation industry.
- My objective for this presentation is to use pictures and video I took while working
in China to give you all an idea of what the scale of soil and groundwater contamination
is like over there and what it's like to be working in the field at these sites.
- I'd also like to discuss growth predictions for the remediation market in China and the
huge opportunities that that growth presents for western environmental consulting firms.
- First, I'll briefly give some background to explain how I came to work in the Chinese
remediation industry.
- After two self-financed fact finding trips to China, six months preparing full-time for
a Mandarin Chinese proficiency exam, and countless international cold calls over Skype, I found
work as an engineer at a Chinese environmental remediation firm in 2014.
- The name of this company was Suntime Environmental, or shangtian huanjing.
- I had previously worked for several years in the US remediation industry, but the scale
of contamination and prevalence of exposure was an order of magnitude greater than anything
I had seen back home.
- The media tends to focus on air pollution in China, but China also has a huge soil and
groundwater contamination problem caused by decades of break-neck economic growth and
industrialization.
- Here is some video I took at a site where soil was being excavated for ex-situ treatment.
- The soil is steaming because some oxidizing agent was added to the surface.
- In 2014 the government released the results of a nationwide soil contamination survey.
- They took a 6.3 million sq km area (for context, China's total area is about 9 million
sq km), and divided it up into an 8 km by 8 km grid.
- In each 8 km by 8 km square, they took one soil sample and tested it for hazardous contamination.
- Out of all the samples, 16 percent had contamination above standards.
- That means they found heavy metals like cadmium, mercury, arsenic, lead, and chromium
or it means they found organic contaminants like benzene, DDT, or PAHs.
- Furthermore, out of all the samples that were taken in arable land, that fraction rose
to almost one fifth.
- Now China is not a country that started with a lot of arable land to begin with.
Food security is taken very seriously in a country where tens of millions died of famine
in the 60s.
- Finally I would caution against making the leap from percent of samples to percent of
land area.
- If you look at news reports from this period you'll see statements like "16% of Chinese
soil is contaminated".
- 16.1% of China's land area is huge: equivalent to the areas of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico
and Colorado put together.
- Little is known about how the sampling location for each 8 km by 8 km square was chosen, but
it's safe to conclude that China has a huge soil contamination problem.
- On top of the agricultural self-sufficiency issue, the Chinese public has become highly
cognizant of how bad the soil contamination issue is.
- Even before the government released the soil contamination survey, there were incidents
like the 2013 "cadmium rice" food contamination scare.
- In May 2013, authorities in Guangdong province released a report stating that 44 percent
of rice or rice products that they tested had unsafe levels of cadmium.
- Many rural parts of the country are still very poor, but standards of living have risen
in significantly large swaths of the country.
- And with that standard of living increase, people are more health conscious.
- They aren't satisfied with just having food to eat, they want food that's not contaminated.
- When local authorities initially resisted releasing information regarding which brands
failed and which brands passed, there was public uproar and they eventually capitulated
to the criticism.
- To the right is the cover of an issue of Century Weekly, a magazine published by Caixin,
which is sort of like China's version of The Economist.
- The title says ge2mi3 sha1ji1, or "the deadly danger of cadmium rice"
- Another contamination scandal of note is what happened in Changzhou in 2016.
- As China's economy has grown, so has its cities.
Old industrial facilities that once were on the outskirts of the city now are surrounded
by homes, offices, and schools.
- That is what happened at the Changzhou Foreign Languages School.
- The chemical plant was relocated in 2010, but in 2016 students at the newly built school
across the street from the site began to complain of strange smells, headaches, and skin problems.
- This video clip comes from a national news report on the crisis.
- Interesting parallels can be drawn between what happened in Changzhou in 2016 and what
happened in Love Canal in 1978.
- In the US, the expansion of the city of Niagra Falls, New York in the 1970s led to
an entire neighborhood and school being built on a former hazardous waste dump.
- There were severe contamination issues, and newspapers at the time published stories
with photos of protesting residents.
- The contamination crisis was eventually declared a federal heatlth disaster by President
Jimmy Carter, and it lead to the passing of CERCLA in 1980 and the start of the Superfund
era in the United States.
- In Changzhou, China a similar crisis played out.
- The protesting parents in this picture have signs that say "save the kids!" and "move
the school away from the toxic site!".
- Now, it must be acknowledged that the US and China have two very different political
systems, one much more democratic than the other.
- But even then, the powers that be in China seem to have acknowledged that the soil contamination
issue is a big liability.
- In addition to some extremely ambitious cleanup goals they published , which I'll
talk about in a moment, the Chinese government is in the process of drafting their own version
of CERCLA.
- Their law, which is estimated to be enacted sometime around 2020, will specify monitoring
requirements and spell out who is liable for remediation costs.
- This picture is of the same site where I took the video I showed you before.
- Excavation and ex-situ treatment was the chosen remedy for this site.
- You can see my coworker in the background to get a sense of how large this particular
excavation was.
- So as I mentioned before, the Chinese government has set some extremely ambitious remediation
goals.
- In 2016 they released a 231-clause, 13,000 Chinese character action plan describing how
they plan on addressing the soil contamination crisis, the highlights of which were the following:
- First, they want to complete a more detailed soil survey by 2020.
- The previous survey released in 2014 (the one that showed that 1/5 of all arable land
soil samples were contaminated), suffered from sparse data and inconsistent sampling
methods.
- Next, they want to establish a system of soil pollution prevention laws by 2020, which
ties into the Chinese version of CERCLA that I mentioned earlier.
- Lastly, and most ambitiously, they want to remediate or manage risk on the vast majority
of contaminated land by 2030.
- "Managing risk" can include changing land use, such as growing non-food crops on
contaminated land or converting heavily contaminated land to forest or grassland.
- All this remediation work is going to come with a big price tag.
- Here
are some estimates.
- I think there is a large opportunity for western environmental remediation and consulting
firms in China, but you have to go about it the right way.
- Large firms like CH2M Hill and Weston Solutions have had to shutter their remediation business
in China or close down their China operations entirely.
- I've talked to a lot of people working in China's environmental remediation industry,
and in broad strokes, here are the things that I think are most important to be aware
of.
- First, Chinese environmental remediation firms need the expertise and experience to
apply remediation technology effectively, but they only want the technology.
- The bidding process for projects is very competitive, and it seems like all the firms
are looking for some sort of silver bullet that'll allow them to edge out the competition.
- The cost of living in China is much lower than in western countries.
That means that the typical engineer in a western country will often earn a salary that
is 5 or more times greater than the typical engineer working in China.
- As a result, the fees that western firms charge for consulting services are often much
greater than the fees charged by Chinese firms.
- Most remediation projects are currently funded as a real estate investment, not because
they need to meet some sort of regulatory requirement.
- Not enough time or money is alloted for initial site characterization and development
of conceptual site models.
- Excavation and ex-situ treatment (like in the video above) is favored because it is
simple and fast.
- Additionally, I recommend against trying to go it alone.
It seems like finding a local remediation firm to market your technology is the most
feasible business plan.
- The only western firms I know of that have been able to make it as a solo venture in
China are large international environmental consulting companies whose clients in China
all look just like them: large international companies.
- Of course, if you do find a local partner, you have to make sure you take measures to
protect your intellectual property.
- I know of a western firm that enclosed their entire system in a locked shipping container
that they could shut down remotely if necessary.
- For the next part of my presentation I'll be taking you all on a little field trip to
a couple contaminated waste sites I worked at in China.
- The first stop on our journey is a site heavily contaminated with chromium ore processing
residue - COPR is a waste product generated by "high-lime"
chromium extraction, an inefficient industrial process that is no longer used outside Eastern
Europe, the former Soviet Union, India, Pakistan, and China.
- COPR contains hexavalent chromium (Cr6+ ), a substance highly hazardous to human health.
- As of the year 2000, 90 metric kilotons of sodium dichromate (Na2 Cr2O7 ) per year
was produced via this process in China.
- In the absence of an effective national system for controlling hazardous waste, the
COPR generated by this process in China was often used as fill or simply stockpiled on
site - As a result, the Cr6+ in this waste has
contaminated current and former industrial facilities across China.
- Note the smokestack in this picture, that will appear again.
- Here are a few more pictures from the site.
- That sickly yellow color is chromium contamination.
- As you can see, the contamination is all over the site.
- Here is a photograph showing what this contamination looked like up close.
- Here is a bailer full of groundwater taken from a monitoring well on the site.
- By the yellow color you can see that the chromium has contaminated the groundwater.
- The next few pictures take a rather chilling turn.
- Here is a picture taken from the site that shows that it is immediately adjacent to some
farmland.
- In fact, as you can tell from this satellite photo, the entire site is surrounded by farmland.
- Note the smokestack near the center of the photo.
- The only thing separating the site from the farmland next to it was a sickly looking
creek.
- Here is a photo taken from the other side of the creek, showing a soil pile contaminated
with chromium.
here some key takeaways for this site: - Heavily contaminated sites in China often
have zero site control.
People can come and go as they please.
- An equivalent site in the US would at least have a tall barbed wire fence surrounding
it, if not a thick clay liner on top of it, to prevent people from getting exposed to
the contamination.
- On Chinese contaminated waste sites I've seen people wander in to spectate, scavenge
recyclable materials, and even grow vegetables.
- In particular, the vegetable growing is most troubling.
- It seems like gardening is a common hobby for the older generation in China.
- As a way of passing time, enriching their diet, and saving money, there seems to be
a tradition of planting vegetables on any vacant patch of land.
- For example in the picture above, somebody has planted vegetables along a public road.
- This practice is problematic when the vacant patch of land formerly housed a chemical plant
and all the soil is contaminated, at least where the contamination won't just kill
the plants outright.
- Here are a few more pictures of these "guerrilla gardens"
- You can see our soil boring rig in the background.
- Would you want to eat vegetables grown on this land?
- The second and last site on our tour is a former illegal waste oil recycling facility.
- The major takeaway for this site is that many of these contaminated waste sites often
have complicated community issues surrounding them.
- At this particular site, the former owner of this recycling facility was unable to pay
his workers their final paycheck because he was in jail.
- When we arrived on site the disgruntled workers all showed up on scooters and started
throwing equipment in the water.
- I don't think you'd need to look at a lab analysis to tell you that this place
was pretty contaminated!
- At another site we were suddenly surrounded by a group of angry elderly people.
- They were all shouting at us about something, but I couldn't understand them.
- I asked my coworkers what they wanted, but they couldn't understand either because
the elderly people where all speaking the local dialect.
- We had to find someone local to interpret for us.
- It turns out that the people were formerly using the land, and they felt they weren't
compensated enough when the local government took it over.
- This seems to be fairly common.
The local government wants to rebuild on a plot of land, and it pays compensation to
the people that were living there or using the land.
- Often the people feel that they weren't compensated enough and this causes conflict.
That's all.
Thank you for your attention.
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