- In the past year, China's Ministry of Environment has sent inspectors to 10 provinces, where they've reprimanded, fined, or charged officials in more than 80,000 factories with criminal offenses. Entire swaths of Eastern China have halted production, prompting some companies to move entire supply chains to countries like India and Bangladesh to meet their orders.
"It's a huge event. It's a serious event. I think many of us here believe it will become the new normal," says Michael Crotty, president of MKT & Associates, a company that exports textiles from China. Crotty says in his nearly two decades in China, he's never seen a crackdown of this magnitude. "The consumers of China don't want red and blue rivers. They don't want to see gray skies every day."
am_Unition:
- They don't want to see gray skies every day
Outsourcing to India and Bangledesh is akin to sweeping the problem under a rug. Since global demand will generally increase as Africa ramps up its consumerism, we can only hope that some mix of technology and regulation curbs the pollution. But I'm not so hopeful. "Oh, boo hoo", right? Right.
posted 2376 days ago