27°C | Light rain
Feb 2, 2011
When the Songjiang district government in Shanghai ordered the Zhaohong waste collection station shut in March because of effects pollution was having on the village of Nanmen, residents cheered.
The plant would not cause any more serious health problems. But the question then became how to get compensation for the people who died or contracted cancer in the eight years the waste station did operate.
Lu Weiming and Wang Qin lost their 22-month-old daughter to leukaemia in August, and they say the foul-smelling water and gases given off by the waste collection station only a few dozen metres away, caused her death.
Nanmen is just one of many "cancer villages" appearing over the past decade across the mainland, especially in the more developed coastal provinces.
By Lu's count, at least 14 people out of more than 100 residents in the neighbourhood contracted various kinds of cancer in the past two years. Others besides little Wang Bole have already died, and experts are laying the blame for the deaths on the pollution.
Lu, who works for a foreign-invested food company in Songjiang district, said the waste station, which opened in 2002, produced a pervasive stench that made people feel dizzy or nauseated. "It smelled sour and sweet, like the odour of benzene. They were definitely processing some plastic items," he said.
They also heard plastic being crushed in a small workshop and saw trucks hauling away high piles of plastic waste. The villagers say the dust from the crushed plastic and the odour from the liquid chemical used to wash the plastic waste constituted a health hazard.
The water in the creek encircling the waste station is numerous colours. Waste station owner Yao Zhaohong paid 500 yuan in 2005 and 2006 to compensate farmer Zhang Renpei for the deaths of his trees growing by the creek, Zhang told the South China Morning Post.
Not far away, some villagers grew vegetables using water siphoned from the creek, while others, concerned about the water quality of the creek, carried buckets of their own tap water to irrigate their crops.
Lu and Wang said they had begun to be suspicious of the waste station when their seven-year-old son, Lu Chenxi , was diagnosed with tuberous sclerosis at the age of three months. They sent anonymous reports to authorities many times but didn't receive any response, nor was there a single investigation. Tuberous sclerosis is a non-malignant genetic cancer, but the parents say the toxic waste triggered a mutation.
Because of Chenxi's disability, the couple were granted permission to have another child. After Wang Qin became pregnant again, she protested at the village committee for two days over the lease granted to the waste station and demanded that it be shut down.
"I was worried because of my first child's diagnosis, so I wanted to ensure 100 per cent that my second child would be healthy," she said.
A cadre from the village committee later visited her home, but said he did not detect any bad smell.
"It's extremely strong," she said. "How could he say he didn't smell anything?"
The birth of Wang Bole in October 2008 brought joy to the family, albeit temporarily. The family took the rare step of giving the child her mother's surname. The girl was pretty, well-behaved and smart, with big round eyes, her mother said.
"She could speak at seven months, and she loved singing, dancing and drawing," Wang Qin said. "She liked to see small animals. In her final days, she could say her own name. When she died in August and her body was sent to the funeral parlour, villagers gathered to see her off."
When Bole was identified with the blood cancer in March last year, it cemented her father's suspicion about the pollution coming from the plant and he started a crusade against it and the local authorities.
About 120 villagers signed or stamped handprints to confirm that the waste station had been contaminating for years, and Lu collected materials to identify 14 of his neighbours who had contracted various kinds of cancers in the previous two years.
It was around that time that Eastday.com sent a reporter to the village who wrote that the waste station, without any environmental protection facilities, had been polluting unscrupulously and mentioned Lu's campaign. A few days later, the waste station was shut down.
An official in the legal department of the Songjiang Environmental Protection Bureau said the Zhaohong waste station had never been approved. He also said the bureau was unaware of the waste station until Eastday's report.
"We are short-handed, and it's impossible for us to check each point in our district," he said. "We found that this waste station was an illegal operation because the waste water and gas being discharged from it were not up to standard, and it sent out dust from processing the waste that polluted the air."
But soon after the shutdown, Yao, the waste station's owner, disappeared. Lu said not only had authorities not launched a complete investigation on the hazards caused, but they also sent some trucks to the plant to help move waste and an excavator to dig the soil before pouring concrete on the ground.
The lawsuit that Lu and his wife filed against the waste station and the Nanmen village committee seeks compensation of 855,000 yuan, and the Songjiang District People's Court has accepted the case, though a date has not been scheduled.
Although prospects of winning the suit are not promising, Lu said sending the trucks was suspicious because a lawsuit of some kind over the pollution seemed inevitable.
"I think they wrecked the evidence of the pollution," he said. What's more, why did the government help a small enterprise move? They were obviously colluding with each other."
In October, the couple also appealed to the municipal Commerce Department, Environmental Protection Bureau and the government to review the district government's decisions.
Shanghai-based lawyer Si Weijiang is representing the family free of charge. He said they did not expect to win since the defendant was the government, but they hoped the lawsuits could pressure the local authorities into handing out more compensation.
Rapid industrialisation has caused toxic materials to be dumped across the mainland, and The Southern Metropolis News has exposed cancer villages in at least Zhejiang , Jiangsu , Shandong and Anhui provinces and Tianjin municipality.
Lin Jingxing , professor of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, who has researched cancer villages for a decade, said all these intensive cancer outbreaks were probably related to the omnipresent pollution on the mainland.
Poisons produced by industries and mines were transmitted via water, soil and agricultural products, he said. Four years of research in a remote village in Shaanxi showed excessive toxic elements in the local soil, vegetables, grain and even farmers' hair. Out of the 154 villagers of 30 households there, 59 had died of cancers over the past two decades.
"I am pretty sure that their high cancer rate is caused by pollution," Lin said.
Five minutes' walk from Lu's home in Nanmen lives the family of Zhang Lianyun , a 55-year-old colon cancer patient. His father died two years ago of oesophagal cancer at age 82.
Although the family is sure that the toxic waste was the cause, Zhang's wife said, "we are illiterate and don't want to cause trouble for the government".
Maybe it's because the village is to be developed into a park by the local government, and residents are in negotiations with the government on relocation compensation.
But Lu refuses to give up. "I will fight against them till the last day," he said. "Our beloved daughter is gone because of the pollution. They must do something for my daughter. I will do whatever it takes for her. Otherwise, what's the point of living?"
Yi Xiaowu, an environmentalist from Friends of Nature's Shanghai branch, said the cancers were pervasive in mainland rural regions.
"Nothing is done to stop the poisons coming from the polluting plants, thus making the farmers especially vulnerable," Yi said.
Copyright (c) 2011. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.