The Shanghai Oasis Ecological Conservation and Communication Center is calling on residential property management companies to establish reliable purification systems at man-made ponds, after discovering that more than half of such recently developed facilities are negatively affecting residents’ quality of life.
The center’s research over the past months found that 52 percent of some 961 residential compounds comprising landscape water facilities – roughly 30 percent of the 2,600 residential compounds developed in the city since 2000 – were polluted in shades of swampy green and black, with more than 35 percent of them filled with turbid contaminants.
“The smell and turbidity of the pollution is only bound to worsen as the hot weather continues,” Du Jiamu, an engineer at the center, who was involved with the research, told the Global Times on Tuesday. “It will not only affect the living environment at compounds, but the balance of the ponds’ ecosystem.”
The report added that vast amounts of algae accumulating on the surface of the water affects the photosynthesis of plants, decreasing the amount of oxygen in the water.
“Living organisms eventually die off, rotting in the water, which creates also a foul smelling environment,” the report said.
But property managers can eliminate these problems by properly maintaining such facilities, said Du, adding that the use of effective purification systems can go a long way in aiding the situation.