Pollution in China: Global Impact of China’s Air Pollution

        Attracted by cheap labor and lax regulations, many companies from all over the world have outsourced the production of their products to massive Chinese factories.  The benefits of inexpensive production costs do come with a steep price, however.  According to a CBS News article citing the World Bank in 2007, 16 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world were in China (Lagorio 2007).

More recently, in January of 2014, an article in the New York Times illustrated how widespread pollution in China directly impacts the rest of the world.  Based on a study led by nine scholars, published in the prominent scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study found that strong global winds called westerlies act as catalysts to intercontinental pollution. The westerly transport black carbon and other pollutants across the Pacific and deposit this toxic matter into Californian valleys and other areas of the Western US.  Black carbon poses an especially high risk as it remains in the air even after rainfall.  Cities such as Los Angeles suffer at least one extra day a year in which smog levels exceed federal ozone limits as a direct result of Chinese factory pollution (Wong 2014). Although the impact of Chinese pollution on American cities is small compared with America’s domestic pollution, when paired together it compounds the toxicity of the air we breathe each day. American cities are not alone in this, as many European and Asian countries are also impacted by the massive amounts of toxic air pumped out in China on a daily basis.