I read a newspaper article, today, from San Francisco that said China, on the one hand, has one-third of its rivers polluted, and, on the other, that it is changing its rules and regulations and spending billions to clean up the environment.

In reality, in many places that I have seen, drains still run directly into channels and rivers, directly from households, in both large cities, like Guangzhou, and smaller villages.  I know what effluence looks like in water.  I used to own a country property on which the septic system would overflow a bit.  Here, in China, I always know when I am coming to a canal or river crossing, both on city streets and in country towns, because I can smell it, and the smell is quite strong.  I can also see it in the water, as I pass.

In China, most people do not drink water from the faucet, and a water cooler is standard equipment, in small homes to offices.  Almost everyone drinks water from bottles.  In the cities, while the water is treated, it is not, in general, drinkable.  In fact, about a year ago, it was noticed that there were mysterious particulate, in the water, here, in Guangzhou.  In the country where the school at which I teach is located the wells are drilled shallow (I have seen them drilled), and waste water for over 10,000 people goes into septic tanks.  When the school tried to build a waste water treatment plant, the citizens of the township took them to court because they didn't want the local stream, which feeds the local farm land, through irrigation canals, to become polluted by a treatment plant built along the stream.   Better the ground water is polluted than the stream.  Sometimes, when I turn on the water, out there, it comes out of the faucet brown.  Indeed, because of all this, China is also a very large market for bottled (or canned) drinks: since people have to buy a bottle, anyway, it might as well be an imported trusted brand name beverage.

Thus, good investment sectors for the future, in China, include not only water treatment and pollution equipment, but also bottled water, name brand beverages and clean energy sources.