How does an industrial city afflicted by acid rain transform into livable one?

Liuzhou is the largest industrial hub in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. It is home to iron and steel smelters, as well as machinery and automobile manufacturers. Once one of the most polluted cities in China, it has made major strides in recent years towards correcting the imbalance between industrial development and environmental protection.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Liuzhou was blighted by serious air and water pollution. It was one of the four cities in China most heavily afflicted by acid rain; in one year, 98 percent of the rainfall was found to be acidic. But now, the environment in the city has improved significantly.

As the city’s Deputy Mayor Jiao Yaoguang explains, the municipal government initiated a special project in 2002 in a bid to control water contamination along a 50-kilometer-long stretch of the Liujiang River, the major waterway in the city.

“There were a number of factories along the banks of the Liujiang River. After almost twenty years of effort, we removed all of these polluting enterprises. Some of them were restructured, some shut down, and some moved out of the downtown area and relocated to industrial parks in the suburbs,” said he.

Qin Guoqin is the chief engineer at the Liuzhou Environmental Protection Bureau. By treating industrial and domestic wastewater, she said that Liuzhou has improved the quality of the water in the Liujiang River.

“We closed over 30 sewage outlets along the river and established 11 sewage treatment plants. We are now able to dispose of 840,000 tonnes of sewage each day, with a 98 percent disposal rate. The national standard for water quality is Class 3, and 70 percent of the water in the Liujiang River has reached Class 2 or above,” said she.

Qin said that the environmental protection bureau also urged key industrial enterprises to cut their emissions of pollutants.

Liuzhou Iron and Steel Group is one of the companies given a push by the environmental protection bureau to clean up its operations.

Deng Shen, the director of the company’s technical center, said the company has invested nearly around 1 billion U.S. dollars in energy conservation and emissions reduction in the last decade.

“We recover waste heat and surplus energy to generate electricity. We now generate around 85 percent of the power that we consume. We also recycle steel scraps, and make construction materials like cement using residues. The whole production process is almost 100 percent recyclable,” said he.

By introducing more than 500 pieces of new equipment, the company has nearly eliminated its discharge of industrial wastewater completely, and has made big cuts to its emissions of sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and dust.

To further restore the local ecology, the Liuzhou municipal government launched a landscape project called “garden city” in 2012, growing more than 8.6 million plants across the city.

In recent years, the level of sulfur dioxide in the city’s air has continued to drop. Official data shows that the city had more than 300 days of good air quality last year.

Liuzhou has become an example of how an industrial economy can be managed in an environmentally-friendly way.