The layered coconut milk mille-feuille cake is a favorite snack of Cantonese people. However, in the mountain pass at the junction of Guangzhou and Foshan, Li Jianhua, the actual controller of the Weijie Garbage Comprehensive Treatment Plant (hereinafter referred to as the Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant) in Huadu District, Guangzhou, made a giant "mille-feuille cake" out of garbage and dirt.
This "mille-feuille cake" piled up with garbage emits a foul odor all year round, which seriously affects the living and living environment of nearby villagers.
Huadu District is located in the central part of Guangdong Province, the northern part of the Pearl River Delta, the north of Guangzhou City, is the main traffic route from the Pearl River Delta to the inland, known as "the barrier of the provincial city, the throat of the north and south of Guangdong", in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, occupies an important geographical position.
In February this year, all the garbage on the "garbage mountain" was cleaned up, and the land could finally "breathe" normally, and the "cancer" that had plagued some villagers in the Nanhai District of Foshan City for ten years was removed.
1 Operate a garbage disposal plant
In 2002, Li Jianhua and a friend set up a cleaning service company in Guicheng, Nanhai. The company's main business scope includes garbage cleaning, transportation, street cleaning, green management, municipal facilities maintenance and other businesses.
In 2007, Li Jianhua heard that the Weijie Garbage Comprehensive Treatment Plant in Huadu District, Guangzhou, was interested in transferring, which he thought was a better way to make money. After many negotiations, Li Jianhua and the cooperative shareholders decided to buy the Weijie garbage treatment plant, and the legal representative was Li Jianhua.
The four shareholders who invested in the Weijie garbage treatment plant with Li Jianhua were Brother Zhong, Ah Xia, Ah Hua and Ah Neng, all of whom Li Jianhua knew when he was doing business, and li Jianhua could not call out the real names of Brother Zhong and others until the incident.
Weijie garbage treatment plant mainly recycles industrial, domestic and medical waste in Nanhai District and Huadu District, there are two sets of garbage treatment equipment in the factory, Li Jianhua specially hired He Lijun as a manager, responsible for daily garbage transportation and garbage incineration after the screening of the disposal.
Li Jianhua's Weijie garbage treatment plant is not very large, with a daily garbage disposal capacity of 300 tons, and the actual amount of garbage treated each year is about 90,000 tons. The charging standard for domestic garbage disposal in the factory is 50 yuan per ton, and the interior, plastic and other garbage from the Motor City is charged 120 yuan to 150 yuan per ton, and the plastic waste is about one or two hundred tons per year.
"Sometimes the weather is bad, the garbage is not incinerated in time or the incinerator fails, and the garbage that cannot be treated will be transported directly to the back mountain for stacking. Since the second half of 2013, about 10 tons of garbage that has not been processed and incomplete garbage that has not been completely burned are landfilled in the back mountains every day. An employee who has been working at the Weijie garbage treatment plant since 2007 said.
"I think that the garbage residue and domestic garbage after incineration have little impact on the back mountain, but if it is chemical medical waste, it cannot be piled up randomly." Li Jianhua defended this when he confessed to the public security organs.
The procurator in charge revealed to the "Fangyuan" reporter that when he first went to the scene of the crime, he found discarded medical waste in the garbage revealed from the cross-section of the mountain, which made Li Jianhua's defense self-defeating.
2 Concocting "Millefeuille Cake"
In order to justifiably landfill garbage in Houshan, Li Jianhua fabricated the reason for using the screened garbage as a reason to plant economic trees with organic fertilizer, and leased about 400 mu of land about 400 mu of Land in Daling, Zhuhu, for a lease period from 2007 to 2025.
According to the contract, Li Jianhua could not dump untreated garbage in the mountains behind the garbage plant. In the "Contract for Cooperative Planting of Trees" signed by Li Jianhua and the Sanlian Zhuhu Economic Cooperative in Tanbu Town, Huadu District, the third point of the second item of the fifth paragraph clearly stipulates that if Party B directly dumps unfiltered garbage, causing pollution of Party A's land and plant, which is the responsibility of Party B, Party B must immediately rectify and correct it.
However, whenever it rains or when the machine fails, Li Jianhua arranges for workers to pile up the untreated garbage of the whole vehicle on the back hill on the grounds of temporary stacking, and after the fact, it is not disposed of in time, resulting in the fact that the garbage is landfilled.
For more than a decade, from 2007 to 2016, Li Jianhua instructed workers to landfill untreated garbage in houshan as the norm. In order to hide people's eyes, whenever the garbage is piled up nearly 1 meter high, Li Jianhua will instruct the workers to cover the garbage with a layer of 50 centimeters thick soil, and a giant "mille-feuille cake" will gradually form.
Perennial accumulation of garbage, as long as the rain, garbage leachate flows along the mountain to the ponds, farmland and vegetable fields of the villages below the mountain, and the affected villagers are miserable.
Around 2010, some villagers in Nanhai complained to the relevant departments, saying that the area where the Weijie garbage factory was located polluted the local water source. However, although the Weijie garbage treatment plant faces the South China Sea of Foshan on three sides, it actually belongs to the jurisdiction of Guangzhou Huadu District, and the factory has only one road leading to Guangzhou, and the terrain is like a "back chair" with armrests on both sides, and the geographical location is quite hidden.
For many years, villagers in the South China Sea have been unclear about the source of pollution, and due to territorial jurisdiction and other reasons, villagers have complained fruitlessly.
Perhaps because of the different business philosophy, Four shareholders, including Brother Zhong and Ah Xia, withdrew their shares in 2014, and Li Jianhua became the actual investor and operator of Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant. Li Jianhua runs the Weijie garbage disposal plant alone, and he is more free to land the garbage in the back hill.
On November 26, 2015, law enforcement officers from the former Environmental Protection Bureau (now the Huadu District Ecological and Environmental Bureau) of Huadu District, Guangzhou City, came to weijie comprehensive garbage treatment plant to inspect and found that the plant piled garbage in houshan, causing landfill leachate to penetrate, seriously affecting the surrounding environment. The environmental protection department immediately imposed an administrative penalty on the plant and ordered rectification.
In March 2016, law enforcement officers from the former Huadu District Environmental Protection Bureau issued a decision to weijie garbage treatment plant to correct illegal acts, requiring the plant to clean up the garbage piled up in the back mountain in a timely manner and re-green the environment.
Li Jianhua said that during that time, the Weijie garbage treatment plant was twice fined 110,000 yuan by the environmental protection department; in September 2016, the huadu district urban management department also issued a fine of 50,000 yuan to the plant, all because it piled up garbage in the back mountain without going through the formalities, causing serious environmental pollution.
3 Sentenced for environmental pollution
Li Jianhua thought that he would be fine after paying the fine, and he still had a bit of luck in his heart. In August 2016, when law enforcement officers from the environmental protection department came to the Weijie garbage treatment plant again for inspection, they found that the plant had not repaired the damaged ecological environment as required, and ordered the plant to shut down.
After the Weijie garbage treatment plant was shut down, Li Jianhua stood at the garbage plant and looked at the back hill, and could not help but shiver, he knew that the garbage that had accumulated for ten years could not be restored in a few days, and he could not clean up and restore it according to the requirements of the environmental protection department. Li Jianhua arranged for vehicles to pull away 200 tons of garbage in an attempt to fool through the customs.
During that time, Li Jianhua had a premonition of the seriousness of the situation and did not dare to appear in the Weijie garbage factory. On November 20, 2016, Li Jianhua remotely controlled He Lijun by phone, asking him to find someone to dispose of the machinery and equipment in the factory as soon as possible.
After that, Li Jianhua, with the help of He Lijun, successfully transferred the funds and equipment of the Weijie garbage treatment plant. As of the occurrence of the case, the balance on the public account of Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant was only 285.23 yuan.
On December 6, 2016, the Food, Drug and Environmental Crime Investigation Brigade of the Huadu District Bureau of the Guangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau received the clues handed over by the Environmental Protection Bureau and filed a case against the Weijie garbage treatment plant for environmental pollution in accordance with the law.
On the same day, the police handling the case summoned He Lijun by telephone, and after He Lijun was arrested, he truthfully confessed the criminal facts that during his tenure at the Weijie Garbage Disposal Plant, he was instructed by Li Jianhua to fill the sieve after garbage incineration and some untreated garbage in the back hill of the factory. The Huadu public security organs criminally detained He Lijun on the same day.
After that, Zeng Liyang, the legal representative of Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant, entered the field of vision of the police handling the case. The police handling the case found that from 2007 to 2015, in order to avoid legal responsibility, Li Jianhua hired others four times to serve as the legal representative of Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant.
At the time of the crime, the legal representative of Weijie Garbage Disposal Factory was Zeng Liyang, the master who cooked rice at the factory. At this time, Li Jianhua and Zeng Liyang had already heard the news and fled, and the police handling the case immediately launched an online pursuit.
On August 25, 2017, Zeng Liyang voluntarily surrendered himself under the telephone summons of the public security organs and was criminally detained on the same day. On September 5, 2017, accompanied by a friend, Li Jianhua went to the Huadu District Public Security Bureau to surrender himself, and the public security organs arrested Li Jianhua on the same day.
After Li Jianhua was arrested, he confessed that his son died in a traffic accident in 2014, which was a great blow to him and his family, and he had no intention of running the Weijie garbage comprehensive treatment plant, and decided to let Zeng Liyang serve as the legal representative, and paid him an additional 2,000 yuan a month as the remuneration of the nominal legal representative.
In addition to cooking, Zeng Liyang also has to handle the factory's bank account annual review, industrial and commercial annual review, and relevant government departments inspection and punishment.
On May 29, 2020, the Huadu District Court of Guangzhou City convicted Li Jianhua of environmental pollution and sentenced him to six years' imprisonment and a fine of 200,000 yuan in accordance with law; Zeng Liyang committed the crime of polluting the environment and sentenced him to two years' imprisonment and a fine of 20,000 yuan in accordance with law. He Lijun handled the case separately.
4 Initiation of civil public interest litigation
"Because this case involves both criminal offenses and civil liability, we simultaneously started the preparatory work for public interest litigation." Long Bixia, head of the public interest litigation department of the Huadu District Procuratorate, said.
According to the case file, since January 11, 2007, Li Jianhua has served as the actual investor and manager of Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant, and in the process of operation, he organized workers to illegally dump and bury untreated primary garbage and sieve off the mountain on the southwest side of the factory, resulting in a loss of more than 3.5 million yuan in environmental service functions.
From 2007 to 2016, after ten years of illegal dumping and landfilling, how much garbage was landfilled? How was the $3.5 million repair cost identified? Long Bixia decided to send someone to the scene to understand the situation.
The pollution site near the Weijie garbage comprehensive treatment plant in Huadu District, Guangzhou. (Source: Profile photo)
"The first time I went to the crime scene to verify the situation was in the summer. We walked for almost 40 minutes to reach the top of the mountain, walking on the top of the mountain felt fluffy under our feet. We walked to the edge of the mountain, casually lifted the stones, and we could see black cloth bags and other garbage, sewage flowing to the bottom of the mountain, and the scene emitted a pungent stench. ”
Chen Junzhi, assistant procurator of the Public Interest Litigation Department of the Huadu District Procuratorate, recalled that when he first went to the scene of the crime to collect evidence, he looked up from the bottom of the mountain, and the entire garbage mountain presented a three-layer irregular platform, from the first floor to the second floor, there was a cross-section about 5 meters high, like a landslide after rain, and the cross-section exposed a lot of garbage.
After grasping the situation at the scene, the public interest litigation department of the Huadu District Procuratorate simultaneously launched the pre-litigation procedures for administrative public interest litigation, formulated and issued 5 "Procuratorial Suggestions", and urged the local government, the competent department of environmental protection, the comprehensive law enforcement department of urban management and other departments to take effective measures to prevent the further expansion of environmental damage. In addition, the court initiated a civil public interest litigation procedure to pursue the tort liability of the polluter.
5 Identify the amount of garbage and the consequences of the hazard
The Huadu District Procuratorate immediately reported to the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate the case of illegal dumping and landfilling of garbage at the Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant.
After research and judgment, the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate believes that the case of Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant suspected of polluting the environment is complicated, and the environmental losses involved in the case are huge, which is a major difficult and complicated case. Ou Mingyu, chief procurator of the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate, handled the case and served as the presiding procurator, setting up a public interest litigation case handling team and taking the lead in handling "hard-bone" cases.
On September 29, 2017, the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate issued an announcement in the Procuratorial Daily on Weijie's garbage treatment plant and Li Jianhua's behavior of polluting the environment and harming the public interest. The announcement period is 1 month, mainly to urge organs and social organizations with the right to file lawsuits to file civil public interest lawsuits. One month after the announcement, no other organization or individual in this case initiated a civil public interest lawsuit, and the social public interest is still in a state of infringement.
In order to further verify the amount of landfills and the consequences caused, the public interest litigation team and the staff of Huadu District Environmental Protection, Chengguan and Town Street went to the scene of the crime many times to estimate the area of the polluted mountain by visiting the surrounding area and measuring the scene.
The case team pointed out that if there is 2 tons of garbage per square meter, the "garbage mountain" has exceeded 200,000 tons. Obviously, the results of the procurator's on-site investigation were quite different from the amount of 50,000 tons that Li Jianhua confessed, and the Huadu District Procuratorate decided to re-entrust the appraisal.
On November 30, 2017, the Huadu District Procuratorate entrusted the Guangdong Provincial Geological Surveying and Mapping Institute to identify the amount of garbage illegally dumped at the site involved in the case. According to the appraisal requirements, the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate, the Huadu District Procuratorate, and the Guangdong Provincial Geological Surveying and Mapping Institute sent personnel to the Huadu Branch of the Guangzhou Municipal Land Bureau to retrieve the digital topographic map of the plots involved in the case.
According to the investigation, there was no change in the topography of the plot involved in the case from 1995 to 2006, and no one else engaged in any production or business activities in the plot involved in the case, and the topographic map met the identification requirements of the amount of garbage dumped in the plot involved.
In March 2018, a report issued by the Guangdong Institute of Geological Surveying and Mapping showed that the land area involved in dumping garbage was about 123,000 square meters, the area of the calculated dumping area was about 38,800 square meters, and the amount of dumped garbage from 1995 to February 2018 was about 352,000 cubic meters.
In order to scientifically and accurately determine the amount of garbage and pollution, on April 25, 2018, the Huadu District Procuratorate commissioned the Guangdong Provincial Geological Geophysical Engineering Survey Institute to survey the area, volume and weight of the garbage. On July 25, 2018, the unit made the "Entrusted Appraisal Survey Report on the Amount of Illegally Dumped Garbage in Guangzhou Weijie Garbage Factory".
According to the report issued by the Guangdong Institute of Geological Surveying and Mapping and the Guangdong Provincial Geological Geophysical Exploration and Exploration Institute, the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate further entrusted the South China Environmental Science Research Institute of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment to identify the damage caused by the "garbage mountain" environment.
The institute identified that the environmental violations committed by the Weijie garbage treatment plant caused serious damage to the vegetation of the site involved in the case, and it was difficult to recover naturally in the short term. The dumping area of the garbage involved in the case was restored to the baseline state, and the cost of ecological environment restoration was 72.355 million yuan, and the cost of service function loss of environmental violations was 17.1435 million yuan.
On November 21, 2018, procurators invited people's congress deputies and CPPCC members to conduct on-site inspections. (Source: Profile photo)
Ecological environment restoration is urgent and time-sensitive, and only timely restoration of the ecological environment can avoid permanent functional damage to the public interest.
On May 26, 2020, the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate innovatively proposed to initiate the pre-enforcement procedure in civil public interest litigation, and issued a "Pre-Enforcement Opinion" to the Guangzhou Intermediate Court, ordering Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant and Li Jianhua to first clean up the pollutants dumped and landfilled at the site involved in the case and restore them to the state before the damage occurred.
6 Repair the damaged ecological environment
In view of the fact that Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant and Li Jianhua could not repair the damaged environment by themselves, the government of Tanbu Town, Huadu District entrusted a third party with the ability to repair it. In the case of temporary inability to fully clean up the garbage, the mountain was reinforced, and two garbage leachate reservoirs were built at the bottom of the mountain, and after the garbage leachate was concentrated, it was regularly pulled away to avoid further pollution of the soil and water sources.
In order to put forward more accurate litigation requests, the public interest litigation case handling team repeatedly went to the former Huadu Branch of the Guangzhou Municipal Land Bureau (now the Huadu Branch of the Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Planning and Natural Resources) to obtain digital topographic maps and other materials of the plots involved in the case, and entrusted the relevant appraisal organs to improve the original appraisal conclusions.
On July 7, 2020, the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate changed the litigation request in the Civil Public Interest Litigation Indictment, ordering the defendant Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant to bear more than 113 million yuan in the ecological environment restoration costs of the site involved in the case, to compensate for the loss of service functions during the period from the damage to the ecological environment to the completion of environmental restoration, and to bear the total costs of ecological environment monitoring, surveying, surveying and appraisal of more than 440,000 yuan, and ordered that when the defendant Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant could not pay off the above expenses, Defendant Li Jianhua shall bear the liability for compensation. In addition, it is requested that the defendant Li Jianhua be ordered to make a public apology.
In order to prevent the defendant from transferring property and ensure that the effective judgment of this case is effectively enforced, on July 16, 2018, the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate applied for pre-litigation property preservation measures against Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant and Li Jianhua in accordance with the law, and actually seized the bank deposits, real estate and cars of the defendant Li Jianhua worth about 10 million yuan.
On July 24, 2020, Ou Mingyu, chief procurator of the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate, together with members of the case-handling team, surveyed and repaired the scene. (Source: Profile photo)
On July 24, 2020, Ou Mingyu and the members of the case team came to the "Garbage Mountain" site to check the repair situation, only to see that the original potholed mountain road had become a cement road leading directly to the top of the mountain. Muck trucks on the top of the mountain lined up to transport garbage, and all work on the site was safe, orderly and efficient. Seeing that the living environment of the villagers under the mountain has been fundamentally improved, Ou Mingyu is very pleased.
After the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate filed a civil public interest lawsuit on the case, the Huadu District Government specially set up a working group for the rectification of informal garbage dumps in weijie garbage factory to formulate the "Implementation Plan for Rectification Work".
At the beginning of 2020, Guangzhou Environmental Protection Investment Group Co., Ltd. participated in the government procurement bidding and won the informal garbage dump cleaning and rectification project of The Weijie Garbage Treatment Plant in Tanbu Town, and the company completed the project acceptance from April 2020 to December 10, 2020.
In addition, the Huadu District Government has carried out ecological environmental protection and rectification work in the whole region, and truly achieved a good effect of handling a case and treating a piece of governance.
The significance of promoting environmental consolidation is by no means a case or a place. According to the Outline Development Plan for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area should adhere to the principle of giving priority to conservation, protection and natural restoration, take the construction of a beautiful bay area as the guide, focus on improving the quality of the ecological environment, form a spatial pattern, industrial structure, production mode and lifestyle that conserves resources and protects the environment, realizes green and low-carbon circular development, makes the sky bluer, the mountains greener, the water cleaner, and the environment more beautiful, and creates a high-quality living circle that is livable, workable and travelable.
Wang Xiaohong, deputy to the National People's Congress and vice dean of the School of Environmental Science and Engineering of Guangzhou University, said when inspecting the procuratorial work in Guangzhou that the Guangzhou Municipal Procuratorate has introduced a pre-enforcement system in environmental public interest litigation cases to serve and ensure the green development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, better meet the environmental rights and health needs of the people, and lead the country in the exploration of restorative enforcement of environmental public interest litigation cases. (The people involved in the article are pseudonyms, this article has been deleted, for more content, please pay attention to the first issue of "Fangyuan" magazine in October, author: Jiang Jiao, Gao Yanyan)
Column Editor-in-Chief: Zhao Hanlu Text Editor: Song Hui Title Map Source: Shangguan Tu Editor Photo Editor: Zhu Xuan
Source: Author: Fangyuan Magazine