Thursday, April 10, 2014

China finds nearly 2,000 firms in breach of anti-pollution rules

David Stanway in Reuters: Nearly 2,000 Chinese enterprises were found to be in violation of state pollution guidelines following a nationwide inspection campaign covering 25,000 industrial firms, the environment ministry said on Thursday.

With the environment identified as one of the government's top priorities after years of unfettered economic growth, Beijing has promised to enhance its powers to monitor and punish industries accused of ignoring state regulations.

Beijing has struggled to make local governments and industries comply with laws and has long been criticized for relying on national campaigns to bring industrial sectors like coal, steel or rare earth to heel. Illegal behavior often resumes once government inspectors have departed.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has targeted firms that fail to install pollution control technology or provide fraudulent emissions data to try to avoid punishment.

In a notice posted on its website (www.mep.gov.cn) on Thursday, it said a three-month inspection campaign beginning last November revealed that 1,888 industrial enterprises had failed to comply with pollution rules. A total of 2,185 industrial sites had failed to meet required emission standards...

A coal fired plant in China, shot by Tobixen, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Subject to disclaimers 

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