Three sentenced for polluting water in central China

Three people were sentenced to prison for their involvement in a pollution case in central China's Hunan Province, a local procuratorate said.

According to a statement issued on Sunday by the Xiangyin County Procuratorate, one of the defendants, surnamed He, who was in charge of environmental protection affairs of a pharmaceutical company in neighboring Hubei Province, sold more than 200 tonnes of residue to another defendant, Hu, at a low price from July 2012 to January 2014 so as to lower the cost of production.

Hu had stored the residue in an abandoned warehouse in Ningxiang County, Hunan Province, before asking a local farmer, Zhang, to help deal with some 90 tonnes of residue in the second half of 2013, though Hu knew that Zhang was not qualified to dispose of hazardous waste.

Zhang then dumped the residue into his fishpond in Xiangyin County and the polluted pond water infiltrated into nearby irrigation ditches and further contaminated the neighboring section of Zijiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze, the procuratorate said.

The environmental protection department of Xiangyin County reported that pollutants such as formaldehyde, benzene and phenol were detected from the sample of the river water.

In addition, the levels of formaldehyde in the water sample surpassed the safety standard by 94 times while benzene surpassed the standard by1,004 times, it said.

The Xiangyin County Court sentenced the three people to jail terms ranging from one year and four months to one year and five months in August 2015 and fined them 40,000 yuan (6,080 U.S. dollars) to 100,000 yuan. The pharmaceutical company in Hubei Province was also fined 1.7 million yuan. Endi