Factory that Dumped Cadmium-Laced Waste in River Is Closed

(Beijing) – Police in an eastern city have detained several people and closed a chemical treatment factory that secretly dumped wastewater containing levels of cadmium more than 45,000 times higher than the government allows into a river and caused hundreds of thousands of people to have their water cut off.

The arrests of the owner and executives at Yichun Zhong'an Industrial Co. Ltd. in Xinyu, in the eastern province of Jiangxi, came after officials had to cut water supplies to nearly half of the 1.2 million people living in the city.