When residents of this northern Chinese city hang their clothes out to dry, the black fallout from nearby Handan Iron and Steel often sends them back to the wash.Half a world away, neighbours of ThyssenKrupp’s former steel mill in the Ruhr Valley of Germany once had a similar problem. The white shirts men wore to church on Sundays turned gray by the time they got home.These two steel towns have an unusual kinship. They have shared the same hulking blast furnace, dismantled and shipped piece by piece from Germany’s old industrial heartland to Hebei province, China’s new Ruhr Valley.The transfer, one of dozens since the late 1990s, contributed to a burst in China’s steel production, which now exceeds that of Germany, Japan and the United States combined.Steel mills, spewing particulates into the air and sucking electricity from China’s coal-fired power plants, account for a big chunk of the country’s surging emissions of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Germany, in contrast, has cleaned its skies and is now leading the fight against global warming.In its rush to re-create the industrial revolution that made the West rich, China has absorbed most of the major industries that once made the West dirty. Spurred by strong state support, Chinese companies have become the dominant makers of steel, coke, aluminum, cement, chemicals, leather, paper and other goods that faced high costs, including tougher environmental rules, in other parts of the world. China has become the world’s factory, but also its smokestack.“It seems to me that China is making all the mistakes that we made in the 19th century,” says Wilhelm Grote, an environmental regulator in Dortmund, Germany, who recalls washing his father’s car as a child, only to see it immediately blanketed by soot. “They will find it is much more expensive to fix up later than to do it right from the start.”Officials say they are especially concerned about the environmental burden of producing more than $1 trillion of goods each year for sale overseas.Of China’s total carbon emissions, which by some estimates now exceed those of the United States, just over a third are incurred in the course of making products for foreign consumers, according to the International Energy Agency, an energy policy and research group in Paris.China’s steel exports to the European Union are expected to double this year from the record set in 2006.
