Grim news from the front line of China’s battle against air pollution
Pollution peak arrives early as factories in Hebei ramp up production
On a Tuesday afternoon, thick white steam billows from glass factories scattered across Shahe, an industrial town in Hebei, China’s most polluted province.
With a choking, sour smell in the air, dozens of children and their parents swarm out of a primary school on bicycles and motorcycles. Most are not wearing masks.
Empty trucks line up in front of the factories, while those loaded with sheets of glass roll onto the city’s six-lane roads, raising clouds of dust in their wake.
“I cannot stand the air,” said Ji Hejun, 47, a grocer who lives next to a glass mill. “I have to keep my windows shut whenever the southerly wind comes, or my home will be filled up with that sour smell.”
The air pollution problem in Shahe, 400km south of Beijing, is symptomatic of the challenges China is facing in its attempts to clean up the environment, with pollution actually worsening in some cases.
Known as China’s “glass capital”, Shahe is home to more than 600 manufacturing and processing firms that churn out a tenth of the world’s flat glass. As in many other factory towns in the country’s industrial heartland, the mills that run 24 hours a day have created jobs and boosted government coffers but have also caused serious environmental problems.