Clean manufacturing structure and its impact on water quality: A case study of Northeast China

Abstract

Manufacturing structures that emit high levels of pollution may put tremendous pressure on water environment. Although studies have explored the relationship between industrial structure and the environment across industries, few literatures discuss the relationship between the cleanliness of manufacturing structures and water quality on a macro scale. This paper presents an indicator of clean manufacturing structures based on a dataset of 43,112 valid enterprise cases, and a water quality indicator based on data from 558 cases of chemical oxygen demand. Taking Northeast China as the study area, spatio-temporal diversity and evolution were analysed, and the mechanism of the effect of clean manufacturing structures on water quality was investigated. The empirical results indicate a significant negative correlation between the cleanliness level of these structures and chemical oxygen demand concentration. Through spatial autocorrelation analysis, we found a significant negative correlation between the spatial distribution of clean manufacturing structures and that of water quality, especially in the central city linkage zone, the West Liao River Basin, and the Yalu River Basin in Northeast China. Improvement of water quality requires optimising the clean structure of manufacturing industries and reducing the proportion of regional high-pollution industries. In addition, spatial lag model results proved that per capita gross domestic product and population density are also significantly correlated with water quality. This study reveals how clean manufacturing structures affect water quality, and the findings can support decision-making in economic and environmental management at the macro scale.