Keeping Pace with Asia’s Rise
The meteoric rise of Asia, home to the fastest growing economies in the world, has also led to a steep increase in the amount of waste we generate
Plastic pollution in the oceans was first observed in the 1960s, after the plastics industry had taken quantum leaps in production and plastics were adapted to all sorts of consumer uses. With Western economies booming, people were ready to spend again in peacetime and the possibilities of plastics shaped every utopian vision of plenty. Today, with approximately 4.6 billion people living in Asia (almost 60 percent of the total world population), half of them living in an urban environment at a median age of 30.7 years1, this heady combination of economic and population growth, urbanisation and consumption is being unleashed across half the world with a staggering plastic rubbish footprint that has become one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems.
The Rise of Asia
According to Dr Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research,, a large proportion of marine plastic debris originates from land-based sources and rivers transporting these debris into the sea. The severe pollution of the oceans around Asia from plastic, chemical and biological waste is linked intrinsically with the rapid economic development of the cities in Asia. Unlike Western countries like the United States, which grew more organically through decades of steady economic growth, the economic giants of Asia like India and China have experienced skyrocketing growth that have brought about many growing pains.
“The increase in population and consumption has overloaded the waste and sanitation treatment plants originally built for a much smaller urban population”
China
In the case of China, currently the world’s number two economy, the opening up of Chinese markets to the world by Deng Xiaoping after the death of Mao Zedong in 1978 led to an unprecedented era of economic growth and rapid urbanisation throughout China. According to the International Monetary Fund2, one of the main driving forces for China’a rapid economic growth is the “sharp, sustained increase in productivity” of its workforce. This increase in efficiency saw China grow by double-digit figures from 1979 to 1994. Productivity gains accounted for more than 42 percent of China’s growth during this period and by the early 1990s, it had replaced capital as the main source of China’s growth.
Before China’s economic reforms in 1978, “nearly four in five Chinese worked in agriculture; by 1994, only one in two did”. This transformation of the workforce from a rural population base to an urban one at peak worker efficiency underpins the root of the plastic consumption and pollution problem. Where previously four out of five workers worked in an agricultural job with access to home-grown food, by 1994, one in two workers were working in an urban job with the family relocated into cities, both parents relocated or the child left behind. China has 61 million “left behind” children3 where one or both parents have migrated to a city to seek employment. With such a large proportion of the population moving to urban jobs, the increase in disposable income, consumption and access to consumer goods in the city has not only increased production and consumption of plastic products like household consumables and single-use plastic crockery, it has also overloaded the waste and sanitation treatment plants originally built for a much small urban population.
Yangtze River: The Lifeblood of the Country
The longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world, the Yangtze carries the most plastic waste to the ocean – 1.5 million metric tonnes every year. The Yangtze River Basin is home to nearly 500 million people. It is the longest in the world to flow entirely within one country. Originating at Jari Hill in Qinghai, it has over 700 tributaries and discharges into the northern part of the East China Sea (Yellow Sea) at Shanghai and Jiangsu.
The Yangtze has been the lifeblood of China’s economic success for almost two millennia. Besides serving as the country’s essential irrigation system for the growing of rice since the Han Dynasty, the Yangtze has served as China’s inland water transportation system with the Grand Canal connecting the lower Yangtze with major cities like Wuxi, Suzhou and Hangzhou south of the river in the Jiangnan region to cities like Beijing in northern China. The construction of the Grand Canal and the Lingqu Canal (connecting the upper Xiang River with the Guijiang) allowed trade to flourish across the whole country with the transportation of goods made chiefly by sea before the construction of the national railway across China in the 20th century.
The Yangtze River Basin accounts for 40 percent of China’s freshwater resources, more than 70 percent of rice production and more than 70 percent of fishery production. The Yangtze River Delta generates as much as 20 percent of China’s GDP while the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is the largest hydroelectric power station in the world.
According to the Yangtze River Water Resources Commission’s 2017 report, annual discharge of sewage and industrial waste into the Yangtze was 35.3 billion tonnes, accounting for 47 percent of China’s total sewage discharge. The agricultural runoff from farms and pollution from industrial belts and high-tech development zones are the main contributors to the poisoning of the Yangtze’s marine species. The extensive loss of floodplains to agriculture has also reduced the Yangtze basin’s ability to detoxify the pollutants deposited into it.
“The Yangtze carries the most plastic waste to the ocean – 1.5 million metric tonnes every year. The policy to grow more urban centres around the Yangtze has exacerbated the problem”
Growing Cities Without Regard for Sanitation
China’s prioritisation of rapid economic growth over steady organic growth of its cities is one of the main contributing factors to the plastic pollution problem found in the Yangtze. In April 2005, China announced a plan to develop city clusters along the middle reaches of the Yangtze River to “create a new economic growth engine” and to promote new urbanisation. These urban clusters around Wuhan in Hubei Province,
the Chansha-Zhushou-Xiangtan city group in Hunan Province and around Poyang Lake in Jiangxi Province cover a total of 317,000 square kilometres and is seen as a pillar of the Yangtze River Economic Belt. The State Council of China put forth the strategy, termed the “Rise of Central China”, in 2004 to create an economic belt along the Yangtze to “promote better coordination in industrial development”.
Although problems with pollution along the Yangtze have always been endemic, the policy to grow even more urban centres around the Yangtze has definitely exacerbated the problem by overloading the already inadequate waste and sanitation treatment plants found in the cities around the Yangtze. The inability of public sanitation and waste treatment plants to cope with the sheer volume of waste from the many urban clusters along the Yangtze is the main reason why pollution problems continue to be a problem.
“The birthplace of ancient Chinese civilisation, the Yellow River Basin may be home to 189 million people, but it has now become a disposal site for toxic waste”
Yellow River
China’s policy of prioritising growth over sanitation spending extends nationally to the cities and economic belts that it has developed along the Yellow River, Amur River (Heilongjiang), Peal River (Zhujiang) and Hai River.
The birthplace of ancient Chinese civilisation, the Yellow River Basin may be home to 189 million people, but it has now become a disposal site for toxic waste, with more than four billion tonnes of untreated wastewater dumped into it every year. Due to the large area that the river flows through, agricultural waste from farms and industrial waste from heavy industries along its course are even harder to eradicate. China’s State of Ecology and Environment Report declared in 2017 that 37.4 percent of the river system water was unusable for agriculture or for drinking.
“They are just treating the river as a dumping site,” said Wen Bo, China programme director of the US-based environmental group, Pacific Environment, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper in the UK. “It’s basically a sewage channel for the provinces that share the river.”
Pearl River
The largest river in Southern China, the Pearl River enters the South China Sea between Hong Kong and Macau. The Pearl River Delta is among the fastest growing regions in China, averaging 13 percent growth since the 1980s.
Like the urban clusters along the Yangtze and Yellow River, wastewater treatment facilities have not kept pace with urban growth. Over the past 20 years, population growth, industrialisation and urbanisation has greatly degraded the region’s environment with large amounts of domestic, industrial and agricultural sewage discharged into the river.
Polluted with plastic, sewage and industrial waste, the toxicity of the Pearl River has led to increase in deaths from blood poisoning and cancer among residents.
Hai River
Heavy industries on the banks of the Hai River are also discharging industrial waste into the waterway serving Beijing and Tianjin. Polluted by agricultural runoff and urban waste, the river is in a particularly dire state because a lack of rainfall causes wastewater to be stored in it for a long time. According to a State of
Environment Report from the Ministry of Environmental Protection, 65.6 percent of its water quality is poor and not fit for human contact. As with the Pearl River, the water and sediment contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are toxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic and are blamed for increasingthe incidence of cancer in Tianjin.
India
Overtaking China in terms of growth last year, India was listed by the World Bank as the fastest growing economy in Asia in 2018. In a list of the projected top 10 fastest growing cities by GDP between 2019 and 2035 compiled by research institute Oxford Economics, all 10 cities are in India. India now makes up 15 percent of global growth. Its foreign investment, economic reforms and strong domestic demand have pushed it up to a rank of 58 out of 140 economies in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report.
Like China, India’s problems with plastic, chemical and biological pollution are directly linked to its economic growth overtaking its spending on public utilities like clean water piping, adequate waste and sanitation treatment plants for its burgeoning urban populations.
Ganges River
One of the most sacred rivers to Hindus, the Ganges is a lifeline to the 400 million people who live close to it but suffers from extreme levels of pollution. Sewage from the cities along its course, industrial waste and religious offerings wrapped in non-degradable plastics are just some of the pollutants dumped into it.
According to a study by the Indian Council of Medical Research, the Ganges is so toxic that people staying along its course in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal are more prone to cancer than anywhere else in India. Gallbladder cases along the river course are second highest in the world and prostate cancer is the highest in India. In spite of this, Hindus believe water from the Ganges can wash away any sins. They bathe in it, drink from it, use its water for cooking and even the dead are thrown into it.