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| Smog covers the Hun River Bridge in Shenyang, Jan. 12. (File photo/Xinhua) |
The Chinese
government met several air and water pollution control targets for 2014, said
the Ministry of Environmental Protection on Thursday.
In 2014,
about 7 million vehicles were banned from the road nationwide because they
failed to meet exhaust emission standards, said Minister of Environmental
Protection Zhou Shengxian at the annual meeting of chiefs of environment
departments across the country.
About
50,000 coal-fueled furnaces were shut down. Denitrification devices were
installed in coal-fueled power generators with a total capacity of 190 million
kilowatt (kW). Desulfurization devices for coal-fueled power generators were
upgraded, with a total capacity of 95.76 million kW.
Steel and
cement plants also underwent large-scale denitrification and desulfurization
renovations.
The
measures will greatly contribute to air pollution control, Zhou said.
Last year,
the country also built new sewage processing plants with a total capacity of 9
million tonnes.
"We
have fulfilled the annual targets set by the 2014 government work report,"
Zhou said, referring to a report submitted by Premier Li Keqiang to the
national legislature in March.
This year,
the government will work to ban all vehicles nationwide that were registered
before the end of 2005 and fail to reach exhaust emission standards, Zhou said.
All
vehicles that fail to meet emissions standards, regardless of their
registration date, will be banned in the three highly polluted industrial
regions of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River
Delta.
The
government will continue to offer preferential policies for power plants that
adopt denitrification and desulfurization renovations, Zhou said.
The dense
smog that chokes China's big cities and industrial areas, including the
country's capital, Beijing, is believed to result from excessive use of fossil
fuels and vehicle exhaust.
The
National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China's top economic
planning body, said Wednesday that Beijing, Tianjin and cities in Hebei will
reduce their coal consumption in 2017 by 63 million tonnes from 2012 levels.
The
reduction will include elimination of outdated production capacity and use of
cleaner energy such as hydro, nuclear, wind and solar.
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