保护好地下水资源

The ministries of environmental protection, land and resources, and water resources announced last Friday that the State Council has already approved a national plan on groundwater pollution control for 2011-2020. Zhao Hualin is a senior pollution control official with the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

"Under the plan, China will form a general understanding of the country's groundwater pollution situation and preliminarily bring the sources of groundwater pollution under control by 2015. Furthermore, the country aims to fully monitor the typical sources of groundwater pollution and to make the safety of essential underground drinking water sources well protected by 2020."

According to a nationwide monitoring study carried out by the Ministry of Land and Resources, only 63 percent of China's groundwater is safe for drinking, and the rest is polluted. Zhao says there are two reasons leading in the excessive levels of heavy metals in underground water in some areas, making it unsafe for drinking.

"This comes partly from the relatively high natural content of heavy metals in the soil in some areas, and partly from pollution."

Currently, municipal sewage, household garbage, industrial wastes and seepage of fertilizers and pesticides have caused significant levels of pollution in groundwater in some parts of China, seriously affecting economic production and people's lives.

According to Tao Qingfa, a senior official with the Ministry of Land and Resources, in some key regions, the groundwater has been found to contain toxic pollutants that can lead to cancer and birth defects, such as heavy metals and other hard-to-clean, organic pollutants.

Testing in the Pearl River Delta in southern China has shown that 45.7 percent of the groundwater there contains lead and 39.1 percent contains arsenic. Tao says this water contamination can last a long time and is extremely difficult to remove.

"It's very difficult and expensive to restore the groundwater's quality once it is polluted. In some cases, the contaminated water can not be restored at all."

China will invest a total of about 35 billion yuan on the prevention and treatment of pollution in the country's groundwater in 2011-2020.

The money will go to six categories of projects, including surveys, prevention, remediation of groundwater pollution, control of pollution in underground drinking water sources, agriculture-related groundwater pollution control, and underground water environment monitoring capacity building.

Zhao Hualin says that dumping sites for hazardous industrial wastes, garbage landfills, mining sites and petrochemical plants will undergo special scrutiny to ensure their highly toxic waste does not spill or seep into underground water.

"Based on foreign experiences, the wastes from gas stations are extremely toxic. Under the plan, gas stations are required to have set up oil protection measures including separation tanks as well as monitoring systems."

According to Zhao, China still lacks accurate information on groundwater contamination, such as the sources of pollution and their environmental risks.
 
Therefore the first step is to get a clear picture of the problems the country is facing and starting to tackle them.

For CRI, I'm Zhang Wan.