A study on the economic loss estimation of industrial wastewater pollution discharges in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on the industrial wastewater discharge of 27 cities in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration. It selects five water pollutant indicators from industrial wastewater discharge, including chemical oxygen demand (COD), total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), petroleum pollutants (PP), and major heavy metal content (HM). A shadow price model for industrial wastewater discharge pollutants in each city of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration is constructed, and empirical research is conducted using government-provided statistical data. The study reveals that the economic losses associated with industrial wastewater discharge in the 27 cities of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration range from 5.9296 billion to 6.448 billion yuan. Shanghai demonstrates the highest economic losses caused by industrial wastewater discharge, surpassing 0.45 billion yuan annually. In contrast, Anqing city experiences the lowest economic losses, approximately ranging from 93 million to 104 million yuan per year due to industrial wastewater discharge.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic loss measurement
• industrial wastewater
• pollutant
• discharge reduction policies

Abbreviations

COD	=	Chemical Oxygen Demand
TN	=	Total Phosphorus;
TP	=	Total Nitrogen
PP	=	Petroleum Pollutants
HM	=	Heavy Metal
GB	=	Guojia Biaozhun
DMU	=	Decision-Making Unit
IAV	=	Industrial Value Added
IEN	=	Industrial Employees Number
IFA	=	Industrial Fixed Assets
ICA	=	The total amount of circulating capital in urban industrial production
SGI	=	The total investment in pollution control of industrial wastewater discharges in urban industrial production
YRDUA	=	Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the key project of the National Social Science Foundation Project “Research on mechanism and supportive polices of environmental pollution synergistic governance in the process of regional integration development of the Yangtze River delta” (approval number: 19BJL035). The authors express their gratitude to the National Office for philosophy and Social Sciences for its financial support and the constructive revision suggestions proposed by the reviewers for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Consent to publish

All the authors agree to publish this paper in this journal.

Authors contributions

This paper was written by four authors. This paper was designed by Tao Sun professor, Peng Wang under the guidance of Professor Tao Sun, wrote the first draft of the article and did the main work to improve the article; Qianqian Du, Muhammad Fahad Sardar and Qinni Ye participated in modeling research, data calculation, and result analysis, and translated the article into English.

Additional information

Funding

This work has received funding from the general project of national social science foundation of China: “Research on mechanism and supportive polices of environmental pollution synergistic governance in the process of regional integration development of the Yangtze River delta” [Approval number: 19BJL035].