On the occasion of the first observance of Qingming Festival (Tomb Sweeping Festival) as a public holiday in modern Chinese history, I’d like to return to a topic that I mentioned in February. Namely, the unfortunate tendency of honored, filial neighbors to burn ghost money in the stairwell of my apartment building (for additional instances…
All posts in Environment
China Environmental Law Blog
A very brief but very enthusiastic plug for the new China Environmental Law blog. It’s only been up for a month, but it’s already published great commentary, great links to important source materials, and some really fine writing. Run by a Shanghai-based lawyer by the name of Charlie McElwee, it promises and delivers daily discussion…
Scrap Made In China
Of China’s many critical environmental issues, I believe the one that receives the least attention is the one most tangible to the average Chinese: namely, how to throw away and/or recycle all the worn out and broken stuff that Chinese businesses and consumers have been acquiring for the last thirty years. For much of the…
China’s E-Scrap Nightmare Just Isn’t What It Used to Be.
On May 4, 2007, Jeffrey Weidenhamer and Michael L. Clement of Ashland University in Ohio published “Leaded electronic waste is a possible source material for lead-contaminated jewelry” in Chemosphere, a scientific journal “related to the environment and human health.” The paper is technical, but the hypothesis it attempts to prove is straightforward. According to the…
Flying the “Foggy” Skies
On Saturday morning, Shanghai Airline Flight 9237, Shanghai Hongqiao to Linyi, Shandong, began boarding at 8:50 AM. Just before joining forty-some other passengers on the Bombarbdier CRJ, I took this photograph of the terminal through the morning haze. On the basis of too much experience, I try not to fly north of the Yangtze River…
Marathon Air Quality
Over at WorldChanging, Mara Hvistendahl asks: “As an amateur runner in Shanghai’s half-marathon on Sunday, I wasn’t overly concerned with my time. But what was I doing to my lungs?” Her answer is an interesting essay that touches on Beijing’s efforts to improve its air quality in advance of the Olympics, what it feels like…
Sierra Club Combats Lead Toys with … Bitter Surrealist Cartoons.
I suppose it’s too much to ask a major environmental group to say something funny about lead-contaminated toy exports from China. Which is why I didn’t ask. But the Sierra Club, the US’s leading environmental advocacy organization, decided to try their hand at lead-related humor, anyway, and the results – in cartoon form – are…
Olympic Air Quality: Special Tianjin and Qinhuangdao Edition
A couple of weeks ago Jim Fallows mentioned that he is snapping a daily photo of the Beijing sky(line) from his apartment window for “later chronicling purposes to see how and when the campaign to clean up the air [in advance of the Olympics] finally kicked in.” That’s a fine idea. Fallows isn’t posting the…
Batman and Hong Kong
I’m in the midst of multi-lounging between this morning’s Bucks v. Bulls game and the Sunday South China Morning Post — which contains this item: Batman may be able to save Gotham City from all types of evil, but it seems he’s no match for Hong Kong’s polluted waterways. The caped crusader was scripted to…
Couldn’t Get Much Worse: Greenhouse Gases and the Chinese Steel Industry
Last Tuesday the International Iron and Steel Institute announced that the Chinese steel industry is responsible for approximately 51% of all carbon emissions released by steelmakers worldwide. No surprise, right? After all, China is the world’s largest steelmaker, with roughly 35% of the world’s production capacity, and – despite government efforts to rein in the…