| Eight years after his arable land was polluted by heavy metals, Zhou Xiaobing finally saw hope of a harvest out of the infertility.”I don’t know what magic they used, but, you see, the land is covered with plants again,” said the 37-year-old farmer in south China’s Huanjiang County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
In 2001, flood water from the Huanjiang River carried mineral processing industry wastes from tailings dams of three major mining companies on the upper reaches to lower watercourses, causing infertility in more than 5,000 mu (about 333.3 hectares) of arable land including Zhou’s 0.6 mu. “This place didn’t even grow a blade of grass at that time,” Zhou said, standing beside his land, which, he claimed, used to yield 500 kilograms of grains a year. Now it is part of a 30-mu soil recovery base set up by one of China’s leading soil cleaning experts Chen Tongbin and his team in 2005. Chen uses plants, such as a home-grown fern, to “suck up” heavy metals like arsenic, copper and zinc, from contaminated soil. The team, nearly 40 members in total, engaged in soil recovery projects in Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan, Guangdong and Beijing, with an aggregated area of more than 200 mu. The base set up in Chenzhou, central China’s Hunan Province, in 2001 was the first arsenic-polluted soil recovery base in the world. “Unlike the first base that only use the fern to rehabilitate the land, we tried intercropping in this base,” said Chen, principal investigator at the Center for Environmental Remediation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research. |