Quality groundwater supervision should be accelerated

The news that unscrupulous enterprises in Weifang, Shandong province, discharged wastewater to a deep aquifer has raised grave social concerns, and also brought calls for strengthening supervision, says an editorial in Beijing News. Excerpts:

According to the Ministry of Land and Resources, 55 percent of the 200 cities that the ministry monitored showed poor or bad groundwater quality in 2011. Even worse, groundwater quality in 15.2 percent of the 200 cities actually deteriorated.

The situation now is hardly better. Of the nation’s 655 cities, more than 400 of them use groundwater for drinking. Groundwater pollution is a danger to both drinking water and people’s lives. Some villages have suffered from high incidents of cancer and other rare diseases because of groundwater pollution.

The government plans to bring all groundwater pollution sources under supervision by 2020, when a pollution prevention system will also be established. But this pace of reform now seems too slow, given how fast groundwater is being polluted.

Efforts should focus first on investigating groundwater pollution sources, especially surface water. In the past, the government’s supervision centered on large enterprises as waste dischargers, while ignoring small ones and being unaware of other pollution sources like sanitary sewage, insecticides and fertilizer. So supervision and monitoring efforts must be carried out more comprehensively.

In addition, relevant data should be published in a more timely and detailed manner. Even though groundwater quality evaluation has taken place since 1997, most people don’t know the groundwater quality in their own cities.

Lessons should be learned from the issuing of air quality, which is now published in real time and is transparent due to public appeals the past two years. Efforts should be made to publish water quality data like the issuing of PM2.5 pollution.