Urgent measures to fight smog
Print Edition
BEIJING has adopted a raft of emergency measures to tackle air pollution after raising an orange alert for the past two days.
On Sunday, Beijing’s housing and urban-rural development authorities investigated more than 2,000 construction sites and 62 areas that did not meet the standards on improving their pollution controls.
The city’s transport authorities sanctioned 3,078 cases involving the illegal use of trucks to transport construction materials. The authorities also ordered 1,556 high-emission vehicles that were about to enter the city to turn back.
Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center said air pollution in the city peaked yesterday, and it expected the air quality to improve tonight because of a cold front.
Last week, the Ministry of Environmental Protection forecast slight to severe air pollution in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and their neighboring regions between last Saturday and tomorrow.
Last Saturday, the authorities raised an orange alert, the second-highest level for air pollution, in Beijing and Tianjin, and some cities in the provinces of Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong and Henan.
The government is encouraging these cities to take various measures to curb pollution, such as restricting the use of vehicles, increasing pollution controls at construction sites, removing trucks that transport building materials from the roads, and reducing or stopping production at some companies.
Air quality usually worsens in late autumn and winter in northern China partly because there is less wind and increased carbon emissions from heating sources during this period.
On November 1, Liaoning Province started providing province-wide heating to all households. Its provincial capital, Shenyang, strengthened supervision of companies that provide heating and asked them to avoid operating boilers in peak hours. The city has also added 1,350 new clean-energy buses to its roads this winter.
China has put more effort into improving air quality in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei by replacing the use of coal with cleaner energy and penalizing polluters.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection said inspection teams had been sent to cities identified as sources of pollution and companies that were in breach of emission rules.
This year, Beijing plans to reduce the use of coal by helping residents at 700 villages to adopt clean energy, remove 300,000 vehicles from roads, and close 500 factories.
In August, China published a plan to tackle air pollution in autumn and winter.
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