THE city’s environmental protection department kept silent when asked about whether they had conducted environmental impact assessments before giving developers the green light to build housing estates that are accused of polluting Shenzhen Bay with untreated wastewater.

    Previous reports by Shenzhen Evening News found that many housing estates pipe wastewater directly into Shenzhen Bay and not to wastewater treatment plants.

    The municipal human settlement and environment commission avoided the question in a response letter to the News, only explaining that there are different reasons for water pollution in Shenzhen Bay, the newspaper said yesterday.

    The city’s water affairs bureau earlier provided a list of residential properties, commercial buildings and urban villages that discharge untreated wastewater straight into Shenzhen Bay.

    An earlier investigation showed that at least one source of pollution is found near every pipe located near the residential properties, commercial buildings, schools and some major construction sites in Futian and Nanshan districts. Only a few of the buildings in the areas were built in the 1980s and 1990s with the oldest building dating back to 1989.

    Most of the buildings were built after 2000, causing a few members of the local people’s congress to suspect that some buildings in the areas fail to meet environmental requirements before they were constructed.

    One member of Shenzhen Municipal People’s Congress, Yang Qin, expressed doubt that the environmental department had done their job properly.

    Water pollution in Shenzhen Bay has been in the spotlight since it was brought up during the city’s recent political conferences. City leaders have pledged to tackle the problem.

    Earlier media reports said about 130,000 tons of untreated wastewater has been discharged into Shenzhen Bay each day, and the water quality in the bay has been deteriorating for three decades.

    (Zhang Qian)