Police take evidence in Taihu Lake./ Guangmingwang Photo
The former deputy director of the Administration of Compulsory Isolated Drug Rehabilitation Center in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province, Han Jianlin, has been sentenced to three and a half years in jail for allowing thousands of tons of waste dumped into China’s third-biggest freshwater lake Taihu Lake.
According to prosecutors in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, Han has been convicted of fraud due to signing contracts that allowed for the waste dumping in the lake, which is near the rehab center.
Han is not the only person to be punished. His subordinate, Zhang Bin, has been imprisoned for three years and nine months and fined 100,000 yuan for taking bribes from a local company and then allowing them the illegal dumping practice.
The heads of the local company, Wang Juming and Lu Xiaodi, have been sentenced to five years and six months and five years in jail respectively, as well as fines of 300,000 yuan and 250,000 yuan. According to the prosecutors, not only did Wang and Lu dump their own waste in the lake, they even disposed rubbish from other provinces, charging between 7 and 10 yuan per ton.
Sun Qiulin, who helped Wang and Lu establish and maintain contact with the rehab center, was sentenced to four years and six months in prison and fined 50,000 yuan.
Taihu Lake, China's third-largest freshwater lake feeding more than 20 million people around the Yangtze River Delta, is China’s secondary ecological red line control area. Residents who found tons of waste, including construction waste, household refuse and electronic waste dumped on the lake's Xishan Island in May and June 2016, reported to the authorities.
Eleven samples of the waste and the water collected on and near the island were tested and found poisonous.
After an investigation, the police found over 23,000 tons of waste by the lake, causing approximately 8.2 million yuan worth of damage. The clean-up cost was estimated at 225,000 yuan (about 34,000 US dollars).
Pollution has been a severe problem for Taihu Lake, and cleaning it has been a long struggle since the 1980s, when economy started to boom in the south of Jiangsu Province. Since then, the lake has suffered from eutrophication, which causes algae to bloom excessively, removing oxygen from the water, thus killing fish and other marine life.
The situation worsened in 2007, when potentially deadly blooms of blue-green algae covered the entire lake. As a result, tap water turned yellow and foul, forcing residents to consume bottled water for a week.
