Residents of Shenzhen in south China's Guangdong Province are stepping up their campaign against a waste incineration power station near a residential area.

 

About 3,000 people took part in a street protest in January over the site, which they claim emits cancer-causing pollution, and also protested with banners last month.

 

Now residents are seeking help from members of the annual session of Shenzhen Municipal Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which started on Monday, to have the plant closed down.

 

"Medical experts have reached common ground that garbage incineration generates dioxins that can cause cancer. Now tens of thousands of residents, who live near the plant, are under the deadly threat of breathing in the harmful smoke every day. How can the local government just let it be?" a netizen named "gongzheng" asked Zhang Keke, a member of Shenzhen Municipal Committee of the CPPCC, who is collecting views for his proposed bill to tackle the city's environmental pollution through an online forum.

 

The area, Qingshuihe, which means "Clean River" in Chinese, was in a relatively outlying area when the government established the facility there in 1988.

 

However, the city has grown so fast that the site is now only 4 kilometers away from the downtown area, and property developers have built several residential quarters around the waste incineration plant, which was turned into a power station in the early 1990s.

 

"It's a problem of city planning, which is far lagging behind the city's actual development," Zhang told China Daily.

 

"The environmental elements have not been taken into the consideration of the city planning and the government's environmental department can do little to affect the decision of the city planning department."

 

He said he would lodge the complaints of the residents in the Qingshuihe area to relevant departments, but added the government should improve its performance in city planning and increase the investment in technological research of the environment.

 

(China Daily March 23, 2006)