More than 4,400 polluting metal processing enterprises will be subject to strict scrutiny by the country's top environmental watchdog as Beijing kicks off a five-year campaign to clean up widespread heavy metal pollution.
A newly approved national clean-up plan lists 14 provinces as the worst affected by heavy metal poisoning. They include several of the most affluent industrial provinces, such as Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, the 21st Century Business Herald reported yesterday.
The other provinces targeted are Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Yunnan, Sichuan, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi and Guangxi .
Analysts said the list underlined a worrying trend of industrial pollution quickly spreading from coastal regions to the vast hinterland in the north, south and southwest, where energy intensive and heavily polluting industries have grown robustly in the past five years.
The five-year plan to tackle metal pollution, adopted by the State Council last week, vows to significantly reduce the discharge of toxic metal pollutants by the end of 2015.
'Emissions of heavy metal pollution in priority areas will be reduced by 15 per cent by 2015 from the 2007 level,' the report said, citing officials close to the drafting of the plan. A total of 75 billion yuan (HK$88.77 billion) has been earmarked for the clean-up in the next five years, with five toxic metals - cadmium, lead, arsenic, mercury and chromium - listed as top priorities in the clean-up.
The plan has yet to be published, with officials from the Ministry of Environmental Protection saying it remains a national secret.