Pollution in Beijing: An Olympic-Sized Problem

Posted by Andy Kondrat, Take Part at 5:58 AM on August 8, 2008.

You may have noticed quite a bit of information flowing from this website concerning the city of Beijing and the problem of pollution leading up to the Olympic Games, but by no means is this problem limited to China's capital city. As the city itself has been working to clear the air around the area the games will be held, high-polluting factories haven't simply shut down around Beijing -- they've been moved to outlying regions.

The Washington Post reports that when China was given the Summer Games back in 2001, the government immediately went to work reducing pollution around Beijing. But the main goal, it seems, has not been to reduce pollution around the country. One such example from the article:

As recently as five years ago, [one] region about 125 miles east of Beijing was a resort, and its sea overflowed with pike, flounder and carp. Now there are few fish, and it's a rare day when Zhang, 53, can see the sun through the smoke. She can tell the direction of the winds from the color of the soot blowing by her home. The gray iron deposits come from the southern steel mills, while the white powder comes from chemical factories, and black dust from coal and coking plants.

As China is an emerging economy (though kind of maybe doing pretty much a lot better than, I don't know, ours), we can't expect them to shut down all their factories, or even be at the point in which environmentalism is a top priority (it took us about a hundred years after the Industrial Revolution to really pay attention, after all). However, you can takepart here and read about Green Laces, the same group Nicole talked about here, an organization that is helping a thousand Olympic athletes reduce their environmental impact.

Tagged as: pollution, olympics, beijing, air quality, summer games, green athletes