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Air Pollution from China

As the song says, “it’s a small world after all.” Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the cycle of consumption and pollution that so intimately links the U.S. and China today.

Here’s how it works: Americans who purchase bargain-priced cashmere sweaters at Wal-Mart, for example, unwittingly contribute to the denuding of prairies in Mongolian China, where the U.S. appetite for luxuriously soft garments has driven a decades-long boom in the cashmere industry. But overgrazing of the prairies has turned once-green pastures to dust, which in turn led to expanding desert, which is now spawning an increase in dust storms that scientists have tracked as pollution plumes capable of circling the entire globe.

The push to lift China’s population out of poverty and fuel its national economy has spurred an energy demand heavily reliant on emissions-producing coal-fired power plants; a transportation shift from bicycles to automobiles; and substantially increased industrialization, mainly driven by the American appetite for low-cost goods. The result? China’s air is now considered the dirtiest in the world. And when it joins with wind and dust storms, it reaches the lungs of people around the globe.

Scientists tracked one particularly filthy plume from Mongolian China to the western United States, where it made national news by clogging the skies over Colorado. It then continued east to the coast of Africa, where it was spotted hanging above the Canary Islands. Roughly 300,000 people in China die each year from diseases linked to air pollution. But that same air takes just five days to reach the United States. There, it has been responsible for public health warnings in Washington, Idaho and Oregon.

While China’s economy (and U.S. consumers) have benefited from the increased production of cheap goods, people the world over are paying a steeper price with their health. It is, as the song says, “a small, small world.”

For more information about this issue, read the article in the Chicago Tribune. 

To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to: www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org