NYTimes | More
than 80 percent of the water from underground wells used by farms,
factories and households across the heavily populated plains of China is unfit for drinking or bathing because of contamination from industry and farming, according to new statistics that were reported by Chinese media on Monday, raising new alarm about pollution in the world’s most populous country.
After
years of focus on China’s hazy skies as a measure of environmental
blight, the new data from 2,103 underground wells struck a nerve among
Chinese citizens who have become increasingly sensitive about health
threats from pollution. Most Chinese cities draw on deep reservoirs that
were not part of this study, but many villages and small towns in the
countryside depend on the shallower wells of the kind that were tested
for the report.
“From my point of view, this shows how water is the biggest environmental issue in China,” said Dabo Guan, a professor at the University of East Anglia in Britain who has been studying water pollution and scarcity in China.
“People
in the cities, they see air pollution every day, so it creates huge
pressure from the public. But in the cities, people don’t see how bad
the water pollution is,” Professor Guan said. “They don’t have the same
sense.”
