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Causes of Environmental Pollution After Industrial Restructuring in GansuProvinceAuthor(s): Wan Yongkun, Dong Suocheng, Mao Qiliang and Wang JunniSource: Journal of Resources and Ecology, 4(1):88-92. 2013.Published By: Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy ofSciencesDOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5814/j.issn.1674-764x.2013.01.012URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.5814/j.issn.1674-764x.2013.01.012
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J. Resour. Ecol. 2013 4 (1) 088-092 DOI:10.5814/j.issn.1674-764x.2013.01.012www.jorae.cn
March, 2013 Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.1
Received: 2012-02-19 Accepted: 2013-01-23Foundation: the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41271556); the National Basic Research Priorities Program of China
(2007FY110300).* Corresponding author: DONG Suocheng. Email: [email protected].
1 IntroductionRapid economic growth inevitably increases resource consumption and pressure on the environment. As is reflected in the history of most developing and newly industrialized countries, environmental deterioration and resource exhaustion restrict economic and social sustainable development. On one hand, economic growth increases pollutants and leads to environmental deterioration; on the other hand, environmental deterioration and resource exhaustion restrict economic growth.
Research into the relationship between economic development and environmental pollution began in 1960s and has mainly focused on the interaction between the economy and the environment. Some researchers have argued that economic growth and income accompany environmental degradation, because increasing economic scales require more resources. Economic development can negatively effect the environment (Lopez 1994; Bovenberg and Smulders 1996; Bao and Peng 2006; Peng and Bao 2006), but can also reduce reduce pollution and improve the environment through science-technology progress and industrial restructuring. Therefore, an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between economic growth and environmental quality (Grosman and Krueger 1991; Stem 1998; Ekins 1997; De Bruyn and Heintz 1999; Dinda 2004).
Industrial structure determines the variety and efficiency
of resource consumption and enhancing industrial structure drives resource comsumption. Industrial structure is an important indicator by which humanity impacts the ecologico-environment system. The intensity of development largely determines economic benefits, resource-use efficiency and environmental pressure (Wang 1999; Xu and Liu 2004). However, the intrinsic connection between economic growth and environmental quality is considered from the perspective of agglomeration of the economy only (Peng et al. 2008; Zhang 2009), and the bidirectional feedback mechanism between industrial restructuring and environmental quality has been ignored. Although a few studies have examined the intrinsic connection of industrial transfer, they have not documented an interaction mechanism. Here, we reveal the evolutionary mechanism and the dynamic relationship between industrial restructuring and environmental pollution.
2 Coupling and evolution mechanism of the interaction between industrial restructuring and environmental pollution
Industrial structure of a country or a region is a constitution and a control model of various resources, including human resources, capital and natural resources, and material goods in all sectors of national economy. The change of industrial structure will lead to change and diversify resource-utilization. Therefore, the industrial structure determines the varieties and efficiency of resources consumption. And
Causes of Environmental Pollution after Industrial Restructuring in Gansu Province
WAN Yongkun1,2, DONG Suocheng1*, MAO Qiliang1,2 and WANG Junni1,2
1 Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China;2 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
Abstract:
Key words:
WAN Yongkun, et al.: Causes of Environmental Pollution after Industrial Restructuring in Gansu Province 89
this is the reason why industrial structure closely relates to environmental quality.
2.1 The concept of coupling industrial structure and environmental pollution
Industrial activities require resources and energy, and discharge pollutants into the environment influencing environmental quality. We define coupling between industrial structure and environmental pollution as the interaction of these two independent systems through their respective coupling elements (Rijisberman and van de Ven 2000; Huang and Fang 2003). There are two effects in this process, one is the stress effect of industrial structure on environmental quality explained above, the other is the constrain effect of environmental quality on industrial structure, which means that environmental deterioration disrupts ecological balance and reduces the carrying capacity and self-cleaning capacity of the environment. This raises the costs of economic activities and industrial restructuring, but usually pushes the wealthy and well-educated residents with their capital and techniques away from living areas and makes industrial restructuring more difficult. Therefore, the degree of the impact of human activities on the environment mainly depends on economic growth modes of industrial structure: industrial structure decides economic activity and environmental quality. That is a resource converter in economic activities, and a controller of the variety and amounts of environmental pollutants (Naveh 2004; Korhonen and Snäkin 2005; Liu et al. 2007; Gao et al. 2011).
2.2 Industrial structure and environmental pollution coupling mechanisms
Industrial structure is a system of population, economy and society. It takes resources and energy from the surrounding ecological environment continuously through human activities, improves the efficiency of resource-use, reduces waste, and inhibits the deterioration of the environment (structure effect) through technological applications and institutional arrangements. However, it also promotes the growth of the economy, leading to more resource consumption, more pollutants, and declining environmental quality (ie, by the total effect). Therefore, industrial structure is a typical dissipative structure. According to the second law of thermodynamics and the law of entropy, the coupling mechanism of industrial structure with environment pollution can be described as an entropy function (Wu et al. 2000; Connelly and Koshland 2001; Liu and Song 2005):
dS = dSi + dSe
where, dS represents entropy change on environmental pollution. dSi refers to entropy flow caused by entropy exchange between industrial structure and environmental pollution; value can be either positive or negative, or zero. dSe is less than 0, which is an entropy of environmental
change induced by economic growth. From the development perspective of the system, environmental entropy change S is an accumulation of time, namely a time integral of S.
∫S·dt = ∫(Se + Si)·dtThe external expression of the entropy change is the
possible variation track of environmental pollution, caused by evolution of industrial structure during the period Δt. This track can be explained by the entropy function:
(1) When dS=dSi+dSe<0, i.e. |dSe|>dSi or dSi<0, by the threat effect and constrain effect, the scale effect of economy pushes the environmental pollution curve from S0 to S1, while structure effect moves the curve from S1 to S2
(Fig. 1). Positive entropy flow will gained from industrial restructuring by the improvement of environmental quality. But, if positive entropy cannot offset the negative one, the changing entropy of the environmental pollution also becomes negative. Under this condition, industrial restructuring often results in a disordered exploitation of natural resources, continuously increased environmental pollution and degradation of the environment.
(2) When dS=dSi+dSe=0, i.e. dSi =|dSe|, by the threat effect and constrain effect the scale effect of the economy pushes the environmental pollution curve from S0 to S1, while structure effect move the curve from S1 to S2
(Fig.2). The positive entropy flow will gain from industrial
Fig.1 Environmental deterioration by industrial restructuring.
S
Structure effect Scale effect
t
S1
S2
S0
Fig. 2 Stationary condition of environment while industrial restructuring takes place.
S
Structure effectScale effect
t
S1
S0(S2)
Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.1, 201390
restructuring and the improvement in environmental quality, owing to the application of new technology and investment for environment protection. But the positive entropy flow would be equal to the negative entropy flow, also stemming from economic growth simultaneously, when added amount of environmental pollution from economic growth after industrial restructuring exactly offsets the reduction of pollution.
(3) When dS=dSi+dSe, i.e., |dSe|<dSi, by the threat effect and constrain effect, the scale effect pushes environmental pollution curve from S0 to S1, while structure effect moves the curve from S1 to S2 (Fig. 3). The positive entropy flow gained from industrial restructuring adjustment outweighs the negative entropy flow gained from economic growth induced by industrial restructuring adjustment. Industrial structure tends to be more harmonized with the ecological system and environmental pollution is decreased.
3 Model and dataFor a given region, the industrial structure will change with economic development. Regions at different economic development levels have different industrial structures. In this paper, we adopted a time series data to conduct our empirical analysis.
3.1 Model construction
Based on the above coupling mechanism we built the estimation function as follows: S = F(Si,Se) (1)where, S represents variation of environmental pollution; Se indicates the impact of industrial restructuring on environmental pollution (structure effect); and Si refers to the impact of economic growth on environmental pollution (scale effect).
The total differential function of (1):
i e
i e
dF dFdS dS dS
dS dS= +
(2)
Divide S in each side of (2):
i i e e
i i e e
S dS S dSdS dF dF
S S dS S S dS S= +
(3)
In this function,1
i
i
S dFB
S dS= refers to impact factor of
the industrial restructuring on environmental pollution;
and2
e
e
S dFB
S dS= refers to impact factor of economic growth
on environmental pollution.Then we derive the empirical model to calculate the
impact factor of industrial restructuring on environmental pollution.
logS = B0 + B1logSe + B2logSi (4)
3.2 Indicator selection3.2.1 Environmental pollutionConsidering the availability of data we use pollutant discharge to measure environmental pollution. Pollutant discharge can be further divided into three categories: gas pollution emission, liquid pollution discharge and solid pollution discharge. Finally, we adopt wastewater discharge, industrial wasted gas emission and industrial waste as variables to reflect environmental pollution conditions.
3.2.2 Industrial structure
Either each pollution variety or the amount of the pollutants of each industrial sector are different, so, we measure the impacts of industries by sectors, such as agriculture, light industry, heavy industry, construction industry and service industry. Industrial structure is represented as proportions of each economic sector respectively from the total GDP.
3.2.3 Economic growth
We use the growth rate of GDP as the indicator of economic growth. Data was from the Statistics Yearbook of Gansu Province and Report on the State of Gansu’s Environment from 1996 to 2010. Specifically, GDP has been processed on a basis of comparable price.
3.3 Empirical analysis
By employing Eviews v6.0 we estimated the regression functions to measure how three types of environmental indicators correlate with industrial structure and economic growth. The estimation results are shown in Table 1.
3.4 Results3.4.1 Wastewater dischargeThe development of agriculture, fishery and light industry in Gansu Province can effectively reduce the discharge amount of wastewater, especially through the re-use of wastewater. Thus, the amount of wastewater from agriculture and light industry is reduced significantly. In contrast, growth of forestry, husbandry, heavy industry, construction
Fig. 3 Environmental improvement through industrial structure adjustment.
S
Structure effectScale effect
t
S1
S0
S2
WAN Yongkun, et al.: Causes of Environmental Pollution after Industrial Restructuring in Gansu Province 91
industry and the service industry all lead to increases in the amount of wastewater discharge. Husbandry, heavy industry and construction are the main influencers of wastewater discharge: impact factors respectively reach 537.7292, 40.563 and 144.2812. For the reason that environmental protection lags behind the development of husbandry and construction, most of their wastewater is discharged without any treatment, which would easily cause secondary pollution. Local governments implement strict environmental regulations on heavy industry, and the total amount of wastewater discharge from those industries has been significantly reduced year by year. However, Gansu is an old industrial province and its industrial structure is heavy, mainly consisting of steelmaking, ore exploitation and smelting. These three industries discharge more than 30% of the total discharged wastewater of all industries. Recent growth in the service industry, which is increasing wastewater, should be a focus.
3.4.2 Industrial exhaust emission
Development of light industry and the service industry increases the negative influence of exhaust emissions with an impact factor of –10.7646 and –4.1201 respectively. These industries lack corresponding environment protection equipment. The growth of the husbandry, fishery and construction industries has severe positive influence on exhaust emissions, especially the impact factor of construction industry at 47.4721.
3.4.3 Industrial solid waste
It is helpful to reduce industrial solid waste by developing agriculture, forestry, light industry and the service industry. Husbandry and construction have the most significant impact on solid waste: the impact factors respectively reach 2.7595 and 2.5150.
Economic growth, promoted by industrial restructuring, has generated large amount of wastewater, exhaust gas and solid wastes, especially for discharge of wastewater (615.4093) and exhaust gas (677.7241). The reason is that heavy industry is characterized by high-energy-consumption, high-water-consumption and is pollution-intensive, and is the major industry in Gansu. Its ratio of
total GDP has increased from 23.64% to 31.76% during the the last 10 years, with increasing rates of 5.6% for wastewater discharge, 305.7% for exhaust emission and 2.16% for solid wastes.
4 Conclusion and discussionIn summary, the development of agricul ture and forestry can reduce the discharge of various pollutants. The development of the service industry can aggravate wastewater discharge, but reduce exhaust gas and solid waste. The development of heavy industry and the construction industry greatly impact the discharge of all three kinds of waste. Due to industrial restructuring and increases in resource-utilization efficiency the total amount of pollutants has been reduced and the total economic output has increased. However, because of current rapid growth in the construction and service industries in China, waste treatment costs are continuously rising, and governance is becoming increasingly difficult. Therefore, during the process of economic development, we should make use of scientific and technological progress to (i) accelerate the transformation of development modes, (ii) adjust industrial structure, (iii) transform the traditional process by means of application of new technology, (iv) reduce or replace the use of toxic and hazardous substances, (v) clear pollutants, and (vi) develop a circular economy. Only by adopting sustainable development, can society stop the destruction of the environment while developing economically.
In order to cope with climate change and promote sustainable development, we should promote technological progress and adjust and upgrade industrial structure, as well as take the propulsion of deepening the reform and innovating new institutional mechanisms. With coordinated planning we should form a long-term mechanism for green development as soon as possible. To this end:
(1) Scientific-technical advance and innovation are important support for adjustment and enhancement of industrial structure. It is important and meaningful to develop a circular economy which greatly increases resource-use efficiency and reduces pollution discharge.
(2) We should be committed to establishing a modern
Table 1 Estimation of regression functions.
Note: T-test value of parameter estimation in parentheses; *** significance at 5% level; ** significance at 10% level.
SubjectIndustrial structure
Economic growth
Equation for testAgriculture Forestry Animal
husbandry Fishery Light industry
Heavy industry
Construction industry Service
Wastewater discharge
–421.319 2.486 537.729 –22.916 –148.455 40.563 144.281 3.259 615.409 R=0.9928(–1.2172)*** (0.5904)*** (1.6590)*** (–1.8587)*** (–1.9176)*** (2.9933)*** (0.3809)*** (0.0871) *** (0.1511)*** D.W=3.4910
Industrial waste gas emission
–31.750 –96.798 17.406 15.939 –10.765 4.525 47.472 –4.120 677.724 R=0.9998(–1.5765)*** (–2.2817)*** (0.9229)** (2.2209)*** (–2.3898)*** (5.7397)*** (2.1538) *** (–1.8918) *** (2.8605)*** D.W=3.4910
Industrial solid waste discharge
–2.708 –0.867 2.760 1.329 –0.730 0.059 2.515 –0.217 30.269 R=0.9908(–1.4529)*** (–0.2208)** (1.5809)*** (1.1346)*** (–1.7499)*** (0.8145)** (1.2328) *** (–1.0752)*** (1.3803)*** D.W=3.4910
Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.1, 201392
industrial system and improve traditional manufacturing industries. Developing a service industry should be the subject of industrial restructure, but it is also necessary to pay attention to comprehensive pollution problems.
(3) Transform energy production and utilization is urgent, as is constructing a modern energy industry system that is safe, stable, economic and clean.
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