Staff Reporter
Want China Times
July 29, 2014
Companies in China are foraying into the emerging industry of restoring polluted environments as the country has prioritized fighting pollution in the air, water and soil as three main tasks for environmental protection.
Guangzhou’s Time Weekly reports that there are a dozen companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets which specialize in restoring polluted soil.
Among these companies, Jiangsu Skyray Instrument and Centre Testing International focus on technologies for testing soil.
Dongjiang Environment, Yonker Environmental Protection and Jiangsu Welle Environmental specialize in techniques for restoring polluted soil and related engineering, while Beijing Orient Landscape as well as Shenzhen Techand Ecology and Environment offer services to repair ecosystems.
Xiao Tingliang, an executive from Skyray Instrument, told Time Weekly that China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection purchased equipment for testing the presence of heavy metals in soil from his company, but sales have risen only slightly during recent years.
Beijing Orient Landscape, meanwhile, sees demand for restoring the ecosystem as a niche market as it seeks revenue streams other than its traditional area of expertise, landscape architecture. In June, the Beijing-based firm signed a partnership deal with US environmental engineering and consulting services provider Tetra Tech and has inked deals to work with local academic institutions including Tsinghua University in Beijing on projects aimed at repairing soil quality.
In March, environmental protection minister Zhou Xiansheng unveiled a plan to fight air, water and soil pollution. The announcement came prior to the release of a nationwide survey conducted on soil by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Ministry of Land and Resources in April that showed that 16.1% of the nation’s soil contains excessive amounts of heavy metals.
The report also revealed that pollution is more serious in southern China than in the north and that in some places the amount of cadmium present in the soil has risen by more than 50%.
The survey, the first of its kind in China, took eight years to complete and covered an area measuring 6.3 million square kilometers. Its findings were not published immediately, leading to speculation that they were worse than feared and could prove politically explosive.
The survey results came at a time when there have been a growing number of disclosures on pollution across China, including cadmium-tainted rice in Guangdong and Guizhou provinces, where 100,000 acres of land have been polluted with mercury, affecting some 100,000 residents.
