Water polluter sued in public interest case in SW China

A company was ordered to restore the ecosystem after dumping waste water and causing pollution in the Three Gorges reservoir area, a court in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality announced on Thursday.

Located in central China's Hubei Province, Huangchangping Mining Co. Ltd. was found to have dumped waste water and tailings onto nearby low land on August 13, 2014, polluting the ground water and destroying the environment of surrounding karst caves.

The sewage later contaminated the water in a reservoir in neighboring Chongqing Municipality that is only 13 km away from the Yangtze River and supplies drinking water to more than 50,000 people.

It was then sued by the Green Volunteer League of Chongqing, becoming the first cross-administrative region public interest environmental litigation case in the Three Gorges reservoir area.

The water quality of the reservoir returned to normal a week later after emergency handling by environmental departments from Hubei and Chongqing.

Wanzhou District People's Court in Chongqing conducted a public trial in October 2015 and announced its first-instance judgement on Thursday that the company should pay 320,000 yuan (51,000 U.S. dollars) in compensation and apologize to the public through state-level media.

Moreover, the company should stop operations until its environmental protection facilities were approved by local authorities, and it must carry out ecological restoration in the polluted area within 180 days or be fined 991,000 yuan, according to the verdict.

"The case will help promote the establishment of an environmental regulation mechanism on a cross-administrative region level, and protect the environment in the upper reaches of the Yangtze river," said Zhang Shengqiang, who attended the trial.

On January 1, 2015, China's revised Environmental Protection Law went into force, which authorized civil society groups to sue polluters to protect the public interest. Endit