Pollution in Rural Area
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010When we talk about pollution, we always associate it with urban districts. At present, as technology and economy develop so fast, the environment in urban district has been indeed seriously polluted. However, the environment in rural area has also been polluted but people always ignore it. In recent years, people living in rural area have got higher income but the environment still remains the same and in some areas, the environment has become worse. According to some data, about 3 billion people in rural areas could not get clean water and more people suffer from cancer due to dirty water.
There are mainly three kinds of pollution in rural areas of China. First, modernization of agricultural production has caused some pollution. China has a large population and inadequate land. In such case, people have to improve the productivity in order to obtain good yield and they always make use of fertilizers and pesticides to get more output. At present , China has become the leading country for fertilizers and pesticides use in the world. On one hand, fertilizers and pesticides can bring more output to farmers, on the other hand, they have also destroyed the land. In fact, much land has suffered from acidification and people can not get any output from it. In addition, when it rains, fertilizers and pesticides are taken into rivers and people have to use the contaminated water which will cause diseases. Fishes and other creatures living in rivers will also be killed. In a word, the whole ecosystem will be destroyed. In Tai Lake, 1300,000 ton fertilizers and pesticides are put onto farmland every year but only 1/3 of them was absorbed. The rest is taken into rivers and agricultural products. As greenhouse agriculture develops rapidly, plastic film pollution is very terrible. Much plastic film has been remained on the land and output of agricultural products has also decreased. Second, pollution occurs because of unreasonable infrastructure construction and environmental management in rural areas. In many regions, the construction is not reasonable, for example, factories are set up next to people’s houses. In addition, daily contaminated water is directly discharged into rivers without treatment. Third, distribution of factories is not reasonable and some enterprises produce terrible pollution when they arrange production. At present, COD and some solid waste discharged by factories in rural areas takes up more than 50% of total industrial pollutants in the country. In addition, the treatment methods for waste in rural areas are not as advanced as that in cities. That solid waste has also terribly polluted the land in rural areas.
As for the pollution, there are some reasons. The government has not paid much attention to it and makes related laws for pollution prevention. People living in rural areas do not have good awareness to protect environment. Local government does not have enough capital to deal with the pollution and they can not get enough technical support for pollution treatment. therefore, how to deal with the pollution in rural areas mainly depends on what the government will do.
