• SOLID WASTE: China's city-dwellers, now numbering almost 400 million, have built up a veritable mountain of waste--each urbanite produces an average of 440 kg of rubbish annually, far more than urban sewage facilities can handle.
• WATER POLLUTION: Less than 20% of municipal waste receives any treatment. The rest muddies China's already rank waters. Almost every major river brims with toxic chemicals; some lesser ones are not even clean enough to use for irrigation. The UNDP figures that 960 million Chinese drink water that's at least partly polluted.
• WATER SHORTAGES: Pollution has made safe drinking water far more expensive. Shanghai now draws its supply from further upstream in the Huangpu River, at an added cost of $300 million. The problem aggravates an already dire water shortage. Two-thirds of China's 600 cities thirst for water, causing an annual loss in industrial output of $28 billion.
• ACID RAIN: The burning of high-sulfur coal in southern China produces a poisonous drizzle, which affects 30% of the country. A 1993 study found that nearly one-quarter of vegetable crops in the Chongqing area had been damaged by acid rain.
• AIR POLLUTION: The gray miasma--from coal, industry ash and leaded fuel--that smothers most of China's cities is barely breathable. The World Bank estimates that air pollution causes nearly 300,000 deaths nationwide every year.
Reported by Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/Beijing
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