Six cities neighboring Beijing were on the list of 10 Chinese cities with the worst air quality in October, though improvement has been made from the same month last year, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said Friday.
The cities, including Tangshan and Baoding, are all in Hebei Province within the notoriously smoggy Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.
Jinan, capital city of east Shandong Province, topped the list which evaluated a total of 74 cities across the nation.
Luo Yi, director of the ministry's Department of Environmental Monitoring, said the air quality of the 13 cities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region met the standard in more than half of the days in the month.
During the days that were smoggy, the PM 2.5, or airborne particles measuring less than 2.5 microns in diameter, and PM10 were the major pollutants in the region, according to Luo.
Luo said the density of these two pollutants had dropped markedly in the region compared to the same period last year, though the readings were worse than the month earlier.
