The Diplomat
Early one morning in 2011, environmentalist Lei Yuting was crouched by the side of the Fenghua River, which snakes through the Chinese province of Ningbo. Despite his face mask and protective goggles he could smell the chemical dyes that polluted the water. His gear drew the attention of a few locals passing by on their morning exercise. They stopped to tell him that the area always smells bad, and that the color of the wastewater changes throughout the day.
Moments later they hurried off. Lei says he got the feeling few chose to linger by a river that a few decades ago would have been clear and teeming with fisherman, tourists and local children. Now, nothing broke the lifelessness except the occasional freight-carrying barge and a couple of lonely white egrets, perched on the muddy banks. There were certainly no more fishing boats.
Lei is a campaigner with Greenpeace, and was in the area collecting water samples for an investigation that would eventually reveal how two textile manufacturers, supplying some of the world’s biggest fashion brands, are discharging hazardous substances such as nonylphenol (NP) into Chinese waterways. NP is a chemical with hormone-disrupting properties that’s persistent (i.e. doesn’t readily break down in the environment), moderately bioaccumulative (it builds up in the food chain), and hazardous to aquatic life even at very low levels.
The use of NP in clothing manufacturing has effectively been banned within the EU, with similar restrictions also in place in the United States and Canada. Of course, this is hardly the first time multinational companies have taken advantage of lax standards in other countries. Exporting the manufacturing industry hasn’t been accompanied by the export of high environmental protection standards, and has led to a host of pollution problems in China, most pressingly water pollution. Ask any local, it seems, and it’s hard to find a river clean enough to swim in in this country.
“These are supposed to be some of the most scenic mountains and clearest waters in China. How is it that they are now poisoned by industry and filled with sorrow?” Lei asks.
Consumers often find it easy to turn a blind eye to the conditions in which their clothes were manufactured, but when a good produced using hazardous chemicals means those items themselves contain hazardous chemicals, then it unsurprisingly becomes a little harder to ignore.
In the latest toxics report to be commissioned by Greenpeace, simulations of standard domestic laundering on 14 clothing samples found that a single wash can wash out a substantial amount of the nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPE) residues present within textile products. More than 80 percent were washed out for half of the plain fabric samples tested. This suggests that all residues of NPEs within textile products will be washed out over their lifetime, and that in many cases this will have occurred after just the first few washes.
These NPEs are then discharged to wastewater treatment plants, which don’t effectively treat or prevent the release of these hazardous substances into the environment. Indeed, they can break down NPEs to form toxic and hormone-disrupting NPs that are then released within the treated water.
In short, brands are making their consumers unsuspecting accomplices in the release of these hazardous substances into public water supplies. And, let’s not forget, we’re talking about a substance that has been effectively banned or heavily restricted in the EU, United States and Canada.
NPEs are a compound belonging to a broader group of chemicals known as alkylphenol ethoxylates (APEs). It’s not enough to set a lower limit for the concentration of APEs in finished products (although we need this as well.) Suppliers could attempt to give the final product additional rinsing, which may help reduce the chemical levels in the product. But this would still be discharged into the rivers, lakes and seas of the manufacturing countries. That’s why the chemicals should be eliminated from the process entirely.
Greenpeace has already convinced six major brands – Puma, Nike, Adidas, Li-Ning, H&M and C&A – to collaborate on a “draft joint roadmap towards zero discharge of hazardous chemicals.” This roadmap sets out the steps that the brands commit to take to achieve the zero discharge of hazardous chemicals, and invites others to partner in this endeavor. However, the roadmap doesn’t yet include a specific commitment or a date to eliminate all uses of APEs.
In Europe, restrictions on the marketing of products with NPEs above a specified level are under development. Equally important is that measures are taken to restrict the use of APEs in manufacture for the countries where the majority of manufacturing takes place, such as in East Asia and Southeast Asia.
As global citizens, it’s surely time to start applying some pressure.
The Diplomat, April 2012.
Image © Lu Guang / Greenpeace
The Diplomat
China’s State Council has released a ground-breaking draft proposal of a grain law that establishes legislation restricting research, field trials, production, sale, import and export of genetically engineered grain seeds. The draft stipulates that no organization or person can employ unauthorized GE technology in any major food product in China.
“This is actually a world-first initiative that deals with GE food legislation at state law level,” according to my colleague, Fang Lifeng, a food and agriculture campaigner with Greenpeace.
“There are currently too many loopholes and weak control over GE food and technology in China. This law needs to clarify what ‘relevant laws and regulations’ can be applied to regulate GE crops. We urge legislators to accelerate the legislation of Genetically Engineered Organisms Bio-safety Law, and also to enhance the supervision of GE food and other products. Otherwise, this law will only be paying lip service,” Fang warned.
The grain law will likely have significant ramifications for China’s rice, the country’s most important staple food. The origins of rice cultivation can be traced to the valleys of the Yangtze River, with some estimates suggesting cultivation began over 7,000 years ago. It dictates the lives of millions of farmers in the Chinese countryside and feeds over a billion Chinese citizens each year. And using experimental GE technology to meddle with such a widely eaten crop could spell disaster – ecologically, financially and for human health.
This latest announcement comes after a highly successful and complex seven year campaign by activists to keep GE rice out of the country’s food market.
In 2004, Greenpeace activists were in Yunnan, visiting farmers who employed traditional Chinese farming methods such as when they got wind that Chinese scientists had applied to commercialize four varieties of Chinese GE rice. While the announcement didn’t mean any immediate commercialization of GE rice – the rice would still have to pass many more stages of approval – it was a major step towards commercialization. “I was totally shocked,” said Sze Pang Cheung, now Campaign Director of Greenpeace.
Cheung and his team set about unraveling the complex web of players involved in the push to commercialize. “For a scientist to have a high level of credibility they need to be separated from approval bodies and industry,” Cheung says. “But in China, GE scientists are such a close knit gang that the people sitting on approval boards for research money, biosafety boards that approve product safety, the scientists at public research institutes, and those at biotech companies who plan to produce and profit from GE rice are either one and the same, or closely connected.”
Cheung says he also sent a team undercover to Wuhan, Hubei’s provincial capital, where they had heard rumors that GE rice was already being illegally farmed. The activists would ask around for any new strains of pest-resistant rice, buy a few bags of these, and test the samples back in their hotel rooms. The quick-testers came up positive. Farmers in the region were already unwittingly buying and growing these seeds, which meant GE rice was already being sold in China – completely illegally.
China is a country where money talks, nationalism is rampant and people take their food seriously. And it would be multi-national companies – not Chinese farmers – who would stand to profit from GE rice from technology and patents. Never before had a country’s staple food gone GE. Monsanto had tried and failed to commercialize GE wheat in Canada, and there were fears they were hoping China would become the first guinea pig, opening the gate to genetic experiments with staple crops.
All of these concerns – the tangled web of scientists with conflicting interests, the government’s proven inability to control GE from “infecting” the market, and the viable threat of national food security – were getting airplay in the Chinese media. Despite this, and the concerns of the public, by the end of 2009 it was looking all but inevitable that China’s rice would go GE. The government, long after the fact, announced that a secret multi-ministerial meeting had passed two GE rice lines even though they had not received biosafety certificates at the time.
With no time to lose, the campaign team stepped up its anti-GE message and received help from the most unlikely of sources: Chinese state magazine Outlook Weekly published a front-page GE-rice debate issue. Then Chinese politicians began raising GE doubts, followed by a string of Chinese celebrities including Mao Zedong’s daughter and the father of China’s hybrid rice, Yuan Longping. Several Chinese scholars signed a petition urging caution on GE rice and submitted it to the annual parliament meeting.
A media storm soon broke out: TV, magazines, newspapers, online media were all joining the debate. Greenpeace also exposed Wal-Mart for allegedly selling GE rice and filed a legal case against them. The team beamed a GE shopper’s guide to half a million Chinese consumers through mobile and Internet services. Chinese consumers joined the campaign, ringing up companies and demanding they go non-GE. Two huge corporations, Cofco and Yihai Kerry, made non-GE pledges and a string of supermarkets also pledged not to use GE ingredients in their own brands and with their fresh unpacked fruits, vegetables and grains.
The tide towards GE rice had made a remarkable reversal. In September 2011, China’s major financial weekly, the Economic Observer, quoted an information source close to the Agriculture Ministry saying that for the next 5 to 10 years, China had suspended the commercialization of GE rice. This latest announcement puts further restrictions on the growth of GE rice in the nation.
“China’s money must be spent on supporting food that is safe for human consumption and the production of which has taken into account environmental impacts,” Fang says. “And GE technology has clearly failed to do either.”
The Diplomat, February 2012.
Image © Greenpeace
The Diplomat
The week leading up to Chinese New Year is a period during which many Chinese are focused on their preparations to return home for the holidays. But unbeknownst to the citizens of the Southern Chinese city of Hechi, industrial waste discharge, containing high levels of cadmium, was also leeching into a 100-kilometer stretch of the Longjiang and Liujiang rivers in Guangxi Province.
Although cadmium contamination was reportedly detected in Hechi as early as January 15, the only specific information made public by Hechi officials was an official media release on January 19. The lack of concrete, reliable and very importantly detailed information impeded disaster relief efforts by city officials further down the river and also led to a panic induced rush by concerned citizens who packed out supermarkets in order to buy bottled water.
The reaction from local officials in downstream Liuzhou was considerably better: on January 23 they began releasing data on cadmium levels in the Liujiang River almost on an hourly basis, disseminating this information using social media. But the fact remains that at the pollution source, an inadequate system of monitoring and inspection of local industry impeded the ability to identify who the actual source of the pollution was.
“Knowledge is power,” and in this case, as with many environmental concerns in China, to have knowledge we first need data.
In 2010, Greenpeace began to suspect that factories along the Yangtze River and Pearl River Delta were releasing hazardous chemicals into China’s waterways. A team of investigators, including toxics campaigner Zhang Kai, were sent in to unearth the extent of the pollution and the culprits at hand. “Our investigators had to work undercover and conceal their identity. For example we had some workers pretend to apply for work at the factory so they could take photos of the plant secretly, and others gathered information by just chatting to factory workers,” Zhang Kai says.
Time and time again, the lack of data proved to be the biggest hurdle when it came to pinpointing the true state of China’s pollution.
“The most challenging parts were the investigations into the production process and the supply chain. This included investigating the effluent from the suppliers’ sewage pipes and the precise relationship between the brands and the suppliers. In Mainland China, factories don’t clearly mark their effluent pipes, so we needed to confirm which pipe belonged to which factory and then we needed to make at least five sampling trips for each factory pipe.”
“This was one of Greenpeace’s most complex investigations because the relationship between textile plants and the big brands was often opaque and it was vital that we established the relationship clearly.”
Previously, Greenpeace East Asia published a feature titled “Ten dirty tricks that factories play in China” that reveals just how sophisticated polluters are at concealing how much and how toxic their effluent is.
Despite the complexity of the investigation, Greenpeace were able to come to an extensive set of concrete conclusions that would eventually comprise two reports: “Dirty Laundry: Unraveling the corporate connections to toxic water pollution in China,” and “Dirty Laundry 2: Unraveling the toxic trail from pipes to products.”
Only then could a global campaign be rolled out involving thousands of concerned citizens and Greenpeace activists, both Chinese and overseas. The campaign would put pressure on some of the world’s biggest retail brands to phase out all hazardous chemicals by 2020. The brands that eventually came on board included heavyweights like Adidas, Puma, Nike, H&M and China’s own Li-Ning. Labels with another market share and pull to transform an entire textiles industry.
Head of toxics at Greenpeace East Asia, Ma Tianjie, is adamant that China’s public has an important role to play in improving environmental standards in their country. And key to this is information disclosure. An inventory of basic information covering who is discharging what, and by how much, will allow government and non-government agencies to trace the pollution back to polluters as well as public pressure on companies and their supply chain to improve their performance.
Ma Tianjie gives an example of the positive impacts stemming from transparency in China: “In August 2011, the ministry made an unprecedented move by releasing detailed pollution information on more than 1,900 lead-acid battery facilities across the country. It was the first time that information on an entire industry’s environmental performance was made public.”
“Reactions to the initiative were overwhelmingly positive. A close scrutiny of the data by the media, environmental NGOs and the public resulted in corrections and a dataset of improved quality, which would only help the ministry to better supervise the listed facilities,” Ma added. “Updated data were released again to the public in November. But no panic followed. Instead, what we got were improved data and an empowered public.”
The Diplomat, February 2012.
Image © Lu Guang / Greenpeace
I recently attended training at the Hong Kong branch of Greenpeace, and snapped some photos of my co-workers, who had also come from the Beijing and Taipei offices. The Hong Kong office is pretty funky – smooth concrete floor, open space office, big windows looking out over Hong Kong’s signature high rises. And the reception features a sculpture that spells out “anti-nuclear” in Chinese along with a stack of yellow nuclear cans.
The dude in the second photo, Miles, looks like the baddest mofo on the planet. But in reality is the gentlest most chilled guy I’ve ever met.
A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that the very large majority of staff in all the East Asia offices are locals, not foreigners. Yes, there are Chinese environmentalists, and they’re a very committed, talented and passionate bunch.
