China's capital will ramp up emissions standards again in 2017.
Clearing up Beijing Image: Faungg |
As smog continues to stifle Beijing, lawmakers have agreed to implement new emissions standards as early as 2017. According to the capital's environmental protection bureau, the new standards will be the toughest in the world.
While the bureau did not give the technical details for the new standards, it has claimed they will be tougher than those currently in place in Europe. Vehicle emissions from the city's 5.5m cars make up around 31% of its often hazardous PM 2.5 levels.
Alongside clamping down on vehicle emissions, Beijing has also closed three of its four coal-fired power plants, relocated numerous industrial plants and taken thousands of old vehicles out of the city.
As part of a national drive for cleaner cars, regulators had taken almost 1m cars off the road in the first 10 months of 2015. Some 995,200 cars and trucks that failed to meet minimum emissions standards had been scrapped by the end of October.
Many of the yellow-label vehicles are old trucks, buses and microvans that fail to meet National 1 standards. The government planned to take 1.2m non-compliant cars off the road in 2015.