Almost five years to the day after Beijing won the right to host the Olympics Games, workers downed tools for the last time at the Beijing Coking and Chemical Works.
The flagship enterprise once supplied gas to heat the private rooms of Mao Zedong and other top Chinese officials and was ”much appreciated” by the Communist Party leadership, said Zhang Xiwen, director of the firm that employed 9 000 workers at its peak, finally closing in July last year.
Mao is credited with the headlong rush to transform Beijing from an administrative and political centre into a powerhouse of heavy industry — a process that is now being reversed at an even faster pace, in an effort to clean up the noxious skies before the 2008 Olympics.
More than 200 companies, including legendary state enterprises like Capital Iron and Steel, or Shougang, one of the biggest firms in the country that poured toxic gases into the Beijing atmosphere for decades, have relocated elsewhere or shut down.
”There is really not much heavy industry left, perhaps just a few small chemical firms that will be gone by the Olympics,” said Li Yongcheng, a former director of the Beijing Coking and Chemical Works.
The six smoke-stacks towering 120m above the coking and chemical works belched 7 500 tonnes of sulphur dioxide and 7 300 tonnes of soot into the Beijing atmosphere every year.
”If Beijing had not won the Olympics, we could have carried on a bit longer,” said Li, of the company which has now broken up into three entities including a new coking plant in Tangshan, in Hebei province north-west of Beijing.
”But the pollution would have shut us down sooner or later.”
Beijing’s pledge to improve the environment by staging a ”green” Olympics helped the Chinese capital win the right to stage the 2008 Games in a vote by the International Olympic Committee in Moscow in July 2001.
Since then Beijing has spent $12-billion on improving the environment, planting trees and parks and curbing polluting industries.
Heavy polluters like Shougang and the state-owned coking plant were in the firing line.
Shougang, Beijing’s flagship steel works and the city’s biggest single polluter, has already shut down a steel-smelting furnace and will cut its annual steel output by half from eight million tonnes this year prior to the plant’s complete closure in 2010.
The steel plant, 17km west of central Tiananmen Square, emitted 18 000 tonnes of dust and soot every year into prevailing winds that blow over the city, helping to make Beijing one of the world’s most polluted cities.
Ironically, the coking and chemical works was seen as environmentally friendly when it was set up in 1958. It began its life supplying gas to Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in central Beijing and to foreign embassies and hotels.
Later it piped gas directly into Beijing homes, replacing coal burning stoves that were even worse polluters.
”The gas works was born because of the environment and its death is because of the environment,” said Li, during a press tour of the abandoned works.
The 100-hectare plant on the eastern edge of the capital is currently idle and may be transformed into an industrial heritage park, said Li, although a decision on its future has yet to be announced.
The disappearance of heavy industry from the capital has helped reduce pollution and last year the city enjoyed 241 ”blue-sky” days, according to official statistics. A decade ago the city had fewer than 100 clear sky days a year.
However the official definition of ”blue skies” often appears to be at odds with reality for the citizens of Beijing, who on those days still regularly look up into murky horizons and breathe in chemical-laden air.
Beijing remains one of the world’s most polluted cities, thanks in part to exhaust fumes from cars clogging its streets. Beijing had 2,88-million cars, according to January figures, a total that was rising by 1 200 a day.
Like elsewhere across the country, Beijing also remains heavily reliant on heavily polluting coal-fired power plants for its energy needs, while surrounding mountains traps the noxious air. – Sapa-AFP