Beijing boots out 300 polluters

Three hundred polluting companies will be out of Beijing by the end of October, two months earlier than the original plan, The Beijing News reported on Sunday.

Pollution will be forced out of the capital city by dismantling polluting equipment, suspension of polluting production procedures, annulment of business licenses or eviction of companies, Zhang Boxu, director of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Economics and Information Technology, said at a conference held on Friday.

"All the polluting enterprises that move out of Beijing are not allowed to take their pollution to their new destination," Zhang said.

It requires cooperation by Beijing and the authorities in the new destinations to ensure those companies abide by environmental standards, Wang Jinnan, vice president of the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, told the Global Times on Sunday.

"However, they will still bring environmental pressures to those places that they move into, especially if these places adopt relatively lower criteria than the capital city," Wang said.

To speed up the process, Beijing will release a catalogue of 12 polluting industries including brick, lime, architectural ceramics, casting, furniture and painting for adjustment of the industrial structure.

Companies listed in the catalogue will not be able to get permission to expand production or renew production licenses, Zhang said.

In a move to encourage adjustment and upgrade business models, Beijing government recently passed a compensation mechanism for polluting companies and simplified the procedure for these companies to leave the city, according to The Beijing News.

These companies have been cooperating with cities surrounding Beijing including Gu'an in Hebei Province and Tianjin on upgrade and adjustment.

In the long run, these strategies will help Beijing develop a more advanced industrial structure and aid its economic development, Wang said.

The moved-out companies will also help develop the economies of their destinations.

"However, environmentally, Beijing and the surrounding regions could still suffer air pollution if the technology and structure are not fundamentally upgraded," Wang said, "as pollution is regional."

Qu Dexi, leader of the Beijing stone association, told Beijing Youth Daily that seven stone markets in Beijing will be moving to Tangshan, Hebei Province.

More than 4,000 stone merchants will be relocated and nearly 100,000 people will transfer, the newspaper reported.

In 2013, a total of 288 polluting companies quit Beijing. Production at two cement plants was suspended as cement capacity was cut by 1.5 million tons.

Two-thirds of the 288 companies were completely annulled or moved out, The Beijing Times reported. One third readjusted, shutting down polluting procedures and converted from production to management companies.

Beijing's industrial sulfur dioxide decreased 7,000 tons and nitrous oxide decreased 13,000 tons in 2013 from the previous year, the daily paper reported.