Shanghai to Spend US$16 billion on Anti-Pollution Campaign

SHANGHAI will spend 100 billion yuan (US$16.13 billion) in the next three years on more than 200 projects in an effort to rid the city of pollution, authorities said yesterday. The funds will be spent on 220 projects in eight areas of concern, namely, water, air, soil, waste, industry, agriculture, ecology and circular economy, said Zhang Quan, director of the Shanghai Environmental Protection Bureau. The major concerns are serious nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in water, high level of PM2.5 pollutant particles in the air, chemical and oil fumes from restaurants, Zhang said.

Article @ Shanghai Daily

The aim is to significantly cut the number of heavy pollution days and reduce the PM2.5 density to 48 micrograms per cubic meter by the end of 2017. The World Health Organization says a “safe” PM2.5 concentration is 25. The city’s overall air quality improved last year from 2013 thanks to the absence of extreme weather and putting in place anti-air pollution measures like the use of cleaner energy sources. The average PM2.5 density was 52 last year, down 16.1 percent from 2013.
Also on the agenda are 17 sewage treatment plans. The Bailonggang factory will be renovated, and three sewage treatment factories will be constructed in areas such as Nanxiang and Hongqiao.

By 2017, all big and medium restaurants will be installed with highly efficient oil smoke purifying facilities, and about 300,000 heavily polluting vehicles will be eliminated from the street. A total of 171,600 heavily polluting vehicles were eliminated from the city roads last year. This year, more than 90,000 polluting vehicles will be eliminated while 1,100 boilers at small and medium plants will be replaced. Over the past three years, the discharge of four major pollutants — chemical oxygen, ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N), sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide had also dropped substantially, Zhang said. Enterprises were fined more than 100 million yuan last year for breaking the city’s air pollution regulations. Some 3,180 hectares of green space have been added in the past three years with the total forest coverage touching 14 percent at the end of last year. About 2.8 million households had been included in the garbage sorting plan.

Its per capita garbage treatment volume of household garbage was 0.66 kilograms daily last year, compared with 0.82 kilograms per day in 2010, according to the Shanghai Greenery and Public Sanitation Bureau. But the awareness of garbage sorting among the public was still weak.