Beijing to shut down polluting industries to improve PM2.5

Beijing has announced a new crackdown on polluting industrial businesses which are major contributors to the capital's PM2.5 emissions, Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) said Wednesday.

The bureau will conduct environmental checks and shut down any businesses failing to meet the new requirements, said the EPB.

Some 66 polluting businesses, including chemical plants and wooden furniture manufacturers, mostly in districts such as Daxing and Fangshan, were ordered to make changes or they will be forced to close and will also be banned from relocating. A total of 1,200 companies might face the same punishment if there are no improvements before 2015, the EPB said.

Pollution such as dust, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds are a by-product of industrial production and lead to more pollutants through chemical reactions, such as PM2.5 (fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns), said an EPB official at a press conference Wednesday.

About 75 percent of Beijing's PM2.5 emissions come from local sources, and industrial pollution accounts for 16 percent.

In a bid to cope with the increasing pollution, the EPB has made plans to conduct inspections among industrial businesses including environmental impact assessments and pollutant emission checks. Companies that fail will not be allowed to be listed for financing or will be prohibited from participating in bidding for projects or contracts.

Some residents, who live near the sites of some of these polluting industries, still doubt whether the measures will have any effect.

Zhou Yang, a resident in Tongzhou, told the Global Times their community, Xingfu Yiju, is surrounded by several chemical plants and a printing factory that emits unbearable foul air everyday.

"The EPB deputy head visited our community last year after our massive online protests. He promised to shut down or relocate the polluting factories if they don't cut emissions. But until now we're still living in the stinky air that has given many of us rhinitis," Zhou said.

The EPB means well with this new policy, said Zhou, but if the supervison or management is lax, then more communities may face the same problems his is going through.

There have been a number of previous attempts to control industrial pollution in Beijing, including prior to the Olympic Games in 2008. Shougang Iron and Steel, Shijingshan district, a major source of pollutants, was relocated, starting in 2005, and ending in 2010.

It will be hard to control environmental pollution overnight, said Zhang Yuanxun, environmental professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"Now we've introduced PM2.5 regulations, so standards are much stricter than before," Zhang said.

The public's previous focus on Beijing's pollution control was about transportation, pollution from motor vehicles, coal burning and construction site dust, and now the government has made detailed plans on controlling industrial pollution, another major source of Beijing's PM2.5, said Ma Jun, director of Beijing-based Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs.

"Beijing moved and relocated some polluting plants before the Olympics, but still there are some remaining in the city that has been a headache," said Ma.

Beijing needs to "clean its own house" first while cooperating with surrounding areas such as Tianjin and Hebei Province to improve the environment in the whole area, he noted.

The EPB has given a lot of publicity to the efforts they made on PM2.5 emission control since October last year, when the public began questioning their credibility after they published PM2.5 data that was in drastic contrast to the US embassy's own monitoring statistics.

PM2.5 control in Beijing is tough work and it may take 18 to 20 years before it reaches a national standard, Hong Feng, vice mayor of Beijing, said at a conference on March 23, the Beijing News reported.