Trucks Power China's Economy, at a Suffocating Cost

By Keith Bradsher | The New York Times
December 08, 2007

Every night, columns of hulking blue and red freight trucks invade China's major cities with a reverberating roar of engines and dark clouds of diesel exhaust so thick it dims headlights.

By daybreak in this sprawling metropolis in southeastern China, residents near thoroughfares who leave their windows open overnight find their faces stiff with a dark layer of diesel soot.

After Mary Leung opens her tiny open-air shop along a major road soon after dawn, she must wipe the soot off her countertops and tables; the tiny yellow-and-olive bird that has kept her company is harder to clean.

Trucks are the mules of this country's spectacularly expanding economy -- ubiquitous and essential, yet highly noxious.

Trucks here burn diesel fuel contaminated with more than 130 times the pollution-causing sulfur that the United States allows in most diesel. While car sales in China are now growing even faster than truck sales, trucks are by far the largest source of street-level pollution.

Tiny particles of sulfur-laden soot penetrate deep into residents' lungs, interfering with the absorption of oxygen. Nitrogen oxides from truck exhaust, which build all night because cities limit truck traffic by day, bind each morning with gasoline fumes from China's growing car fleet to form dense smog that inflames lungs and can cause severe coughing and asthma.

The 10 million trucks on Chinese roads, more than a quarter of all vehicles in this country, are a major reason that China accounts for half the world's annual increase in oil consumption. Sating their thirst helped push the price of oil to nearly $100 a barrel this year, before a recent decline, and has propelled China past the United States as the world's largest emitter of global-warming gases.

Yet cleaning up truck pollution presents complex problems for China's leaders.

For instance, regulators have begun raising emissions standards for new trucks, but have left millions of older ones belching black smoke. Forcing businesses and farmers to buy more expensive vehicles could put a drag on the economy, which already faces inflationary pressure from rising food prices and other costs.

That fear of inflation -- not to mention political and social unrest -- has led Beijing to prevent the country's mostly state-owned oil companies from increasing diesel prices at the pump in pace with global oil prices. Raising fuel prices for farmers, whose incomes have lagged behind those of city dwellers and who need diesel for their tractors, is one concern. Lower diesel prices also essentially subsidize every manufacturer in China's elaborate export machine.

But price controls create a vicious circle. Oil giants like Sinopec, losing money on every gallon of diesel they refine because of the low sales prices, upgrade refineries slowly, if at all. And they seek out cheap crude, which has high levels of sulfur, to make diesel, negating the effects of higher emissions standards for new vehicles.

"Sinopec is trying our best to purchase low-quality crudes -- much heavier and more sulfur content," said Evan Jia, a Sinopec spokesman. "We buy those kinds of crudes to lower the purchasing cost."

Low diesel prices frequently make trucks more cost-effective than trains, which pollute less. Sales of large freight trucks in China outpace those in the United States by a wide margin. Demand for diesel at service stations is so great, and supplies are so tight, that rationing and shortages have become common. Truck drivers idle for hours only to be allowed to buy as little as five gallons of fuel.

Since 2000, sales of heavy-duty trucks have risen sixfold while car sales have risen eightfold. This has created myriad problems, from gridlock that chokes China's cities to pollution that chokes its citizens, contributing each year to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from heart and lung problems, according to the World Bank.

Working in the Fumes

Ms. Leung, the shopkeeper, is a slender, tidy, 44-year-old woman with a cheery disposition. She used to keep her little bird in a wooden cage over the entrance to the two battered plastic tables where she serves soft drinks and fresh waffles for less than 40 cents each.

All day, trucks, buses and cars grind past. While large trucks are banned in Guangzhou from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., some obtain special permits for daytime access. And many medium-size trucks with diesel engines are allowed in the city during the day if they carry local license plates.

"We had to put out bowls of water in the cage," Ms. Leung said, so the bird could constantly wash itself. She finally moved the bird, a Pekin robin, to her home on a quieter street.

She tries not to think about what the exhaust fumes are doing to her own health.

"My throat hurts all the time," she said. "I suck on throat lozenges for it. It's unbearable."

International experts say that hundreds of millions of Chinese are exposed every day to the potentially lethal mix of soot particles and smog.

American regulators have labeled diesel soot a likely carcinogen. A growing body of academic literature blames tiny airborne particles from diesel exhaust, coal-fired power plants and other sources for up to 90 percent of all deaths from outdoor air pollution, because the particles penetrate so deeply into lungs. Diesel engines also emit large quantities of nitrogen oxides, which react with gasoline fumes to produce photochemical smog when hit by sunlight.

Mainland Chinese atmospheric scientists concluded in an analysis this year in The Journal of Environmental Sciences that, here in Guangzhou, particles were the pollutant farthest out of line with air-quality norms 226 days a year. Sulfur dioxide, which comes mainly from burning coal, was the pollutant that exceeded norms by the widest margin 45 days a year, while nitrogen oxides were the most prominent pollutant 23 days a year.

The air was relatively clean on the remaining 71 days a year.

New tests by Chinese and American researchers in Tianjin, in northeastern China, found that diesel engines in trucks and buses accounted for 93 percent of all nitrogen oxides from vehicles in China and 97 percent of particles.

A separate academic study of diesel exhaust here in Guangzhou found that Chinese trucks put out particles in unusually large quantities and sizes, as engines with often inadequate or damaged emissions equipment were forced to pull overweight loads.

Ms. Leung said she had little choice but to stick it out.

She and her husband had a shop on a less-busy street, but the building was torn down and the local government gave her the current lease as a substitute. They are not allowed to sell the lease or apply for a different one, and the shop is their sole means of support for two daughters, the elder one the first in the family to go to college.

The only option, Ms. Leung said, is to hope that her building will be condemned so the city will issue her a lease in a more healthful location. "I'm dreaming of it," she said.

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