environment Archives - Page 2 of 7

River Chiefs

In May 2007, a large bloom of blue-green algae spread on Lake Tai, and residents of Wuxi rushed to buy bottled water. In August, Wuxi issued trial rules with water quality targets for its rivers and lakes. People’s Daily later reported that this is regarded as the origin of the river chief system (hezhang zhi), which makes the leading Party and government officials of each level responsible for each river.

Changxing County in Zhejiang had already set up river chiefs in 2003. In December 2016, the Central Committee and the State Council ordered the system for the whole country.

Seven Carbon Markets

In October 2011, seven provinces and cities, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangdong, Hubei and Shenzhen, started local pilots for trading carbon emission rights.

On July 16, 2021, national carbon emission trading started at the Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange.

The Plastic Bag Rule

From June 1, 2008, a State Council rule banned the production, sale and use of shopping bags thinner than 0.025 millimeters, and shops had to charge for bags.

In 2016, an official of the National Development and Reform Commission reported that bag use in supermarkets and malls had generally fallen by more than two-thirds. The official also named the problems: enforcement in farmers’ markets was hard, the public’s understanding differed, and substitutes cost more. Reporters found compliant bags hard to find in the markets.

Painting the Hills Green

In 2019, media reported that mines of Shandong Changsheng Mining in Xintai, Shandong, had painted the rocks around a stone-processing plant green. According to the reports, the aim was to get through environmental inspections and to deceive satellite monitoring.

Seelampur

“Delhi’s Seelampur is India’s largest e-waste market,” the civic news site Citizen Matters reports. “The market employs close to 50,000 informal workers making a living out of extracting valuable metals.”

Waste From the Rest of the City

Dharavi in Mumbai has “an increasingly large recycling industry, processing waste from other parts of Mumbai,” Wikipedia notes.

“An estimated 20% of its inhabitants work on different aspects of waste processing,” Dialogue Earth reported.

The Smog Tower

On August 23, 2021, the Delhi government inaugurated a smog tower at Connaught Place. Reports put its cost at 20 to 23 crore rupees. In November 2023, as the pollution season began, it was shut down. The Delhi Pollution Control Committee told the National Green Tribunal: “Smog towers are ineffective at controlling air pollution.”

Delhi’s winters bring emergency measures. Under the odd-even rule, cars with odd and even number plates drive on alternate days. It ran in January and April 2016 and again in November 2019. ThePrint counted 17 times that the Graded Response Action Plan was imposed between January 2025 and January 2026. In 13 of them, the order came after pollution had already reached the threshold.

The Clay Cup

A kulhad is a clay cup. It is thrown away after one use. In 2004 the railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav tried to bring kulhads back for tea at stations and on trains.

By 2008 the effort was considered a failure. In 2019 the minister Nitin Gadkari tried again: “I have written a letter to Piyush Goyal to make use of kulhads mandatory at 100 railway stations.”

Reverse Osmosis

On May 28, 2019, the National Green Tribunal told the Environment Ministry to prohibit reverse osmosis water purifiers in areas where the water contains less than 500 milligrams of dissolved solids per liter.

The tribunal also ordered that purifiers recover at least 60 percent of the water they treat. Under the earlier standard, the required recovery had been only 20 percent.

Trainer Farmers

In Andhra Pradesh, zero budget natural farming spread through “trainer farmers, each of whom tries to reach out to and convert 100 farmers,” Governance Now reported in December 2018. One of them, Y. Lakshmi, grew paddy on three acres and harvested 15 bags more than her neighbors, the magazine wrote. Six groups of farmers then learned from her.