Xinhua News Agency, Shijiazhuang, May 23 (Reporter Gong Zhihong, Gao Bo) In recent years, every autumn and winter, smog weather has become a "heart and lung disease" that plagues Hebei. Among the bottom ten air quality rankings of 74 cities in China, Hebei occupies 5 to 7 seats every year.
After five years of treatment, the average concentration of PM2.5 in Hebei Province in 2017 was 65 μ g/m3, which was 39.8% lower than that in 2013, exceeding the target set by the national "Atmosphere Ten".
Curettage of bone to cure poison: open the knife to structural pollution
"Last November, we shut down two production lines." Li Bingchen, Minister of Environmental Protection Department of Great Wall Glass Co., Ltd. in Shahe City, Hebei Province, told reporters that last year was the best time for the glass market. Taking the initiative to shut down is tantamount to cutting the meat and gouging out the heart, but if environmental protection is not enough, it may drag down the development of the whole company.
Glass industry is the pillar industry of Shahe. At present, Shahe has an annual output of 160 million weight boxes of flat glass, accounting for about 20% of the national total. Zhang Lige, deputy director of Shahe Branch of Xingtai Environmental Protection Bureau, said that due to the agglomeration of glass enterprises, Shahe is facing great environmental pressure. Therefore, Shahe has implemented stricter emission standards than the national standards. The national emission standards for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the glass industry are 400 mg/m3 and 700 mg/m3 respectively, and the local standards have been raised to 50 mg/m3 and 200 mg/m3 respectively.
The emphasis on industrial energy structure is the fundamental reason for air pollution in Hebei. The emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and smoke dust from steel, cement, electricity and other industries account for 75.7%, 87.2% and 87.5% of the province’s industrial emissions respectively, which are important sources of air pollution.
Since 2013, Hebei has taken structural adjustment as a fundamental solution with the courage to cure poison by scraping the bones, and has played a "combination boxing" such as reducing coal, managing enterprises and controlling vehicles, and vigorously promoted air pollution control.
Qian Li, vice governor of Hebei Province, said that Hebei formulated and implemented stricter national standards. From 2013 to 2017, the province reduced the steel-making capacity by 69.93 million tons, coal by 31.44 million tons, cement by 70.57 million tons and glass by 71.73 million weight boxes, all exceeding the national targets.
In view of the chronic pollution caused by the energy structure of "one coal dominates", Hebei launched a "tough battle against coal", and completed a total of 3.278 million households replacing coal with gas and electricity in rural areas, contributing 44% to the improvement of the average concentration of PM2.5 during the heating period.
Due to historical reasons, many counties and districts in Hebei have formed the phenomenon of "scattered and polluted" enterprises clustered together, which has an important impact on the environment. In 2017, Hebei cleaned up and rectified 108,000 "scattered and polluted" enterprises in accordance with the principles of shutting down and banning a batch, integrating and relocating a batch and upgrading a batch.
Scientific Haze Control: "Civil air defense+technical defense" laid tight encirclement.
There are many sources of pollution, and the grass-roots environmental protection law enforcement power is limited, which is a common problem in Hebei’s air pollution control. To this end, Hebei implements expert guidance, scientific treatment of haze, and implements "civil air defense+technical defense" to strengthen environmental supervision.
There are more than 50,000 environmental supervision enterprises in Hengshui, but there are only 513 grassroots environmental law enforcement personnel. The city has established a "two networks and two systems" intelligent platform for air governance to realize real-time monitoring of air quality and major pollution sources in the region. Once the pollutants exceed the standard, the system will automatically alarm and transmit the point information to the mobile phone of law enforcement officers.
"The automatic monitoring network of pollution sources not only establishes corresponding monitoring facilities for special factors emitted by different pollution sources, but also records electricity in separate tables for enterprise production facilities and pollution control facilities to realize full monitoring of pollution nodes." He Litao, director of Hengshui Environmental Protection Bureau, introduced.
At present, 143 counties (cities, districts) in Hebei have taken the lead in achieving full coverage of monitoring points throughout the country. Hebei proposed that this year, all monitoring stations in towns and development zones above the provincial level and infrared monitoring of open burning will be fully covered. Fully implement the three-level grid supervision of counties and villages, and realize the full coverage of the construction of township environmental protection institutes.
In the past five years, Hebei has strengthened the top-level design and intensively issued a series of guiding documents on air pollution prevention and control. In 2017, the 1+18 plan for air pollution control was formulated, covering all aspects of air pollution control such as industrial structure optimization, industrial enterprise governance, clean heating transformation, urban and rural greening and expansion. Twenty-nine departments of cities and provincial governments in Hebei set up "1+18" policy system promotion agencies, established a list of tasks, responsibilities and time limits, and formed a strong synergy for tackling pollution.
Iron fist pollution control: opening up the "last mile" of environmental protection
In order to solve the "last mile" problem of haze control, Hebei took the lead in establishing a provincial-level environmental protection supervision system in the country by drawing lessons from the central supervision model, taking the ineffective implementation of haze control measures as an important part of the provincial party Committee’s supervision accountability, and introducing air quality notification ranking and reward and punishment accountability methods.
The cities and counties that failed to achieve the air quality improvement target in 2017 were publicly exposed in the TV media, and one county magistrate and four deputy county magistrates were dismissed. The province gave 2,107 disciplinary actions to the party and government due to poor governance.
In order to severely crack down on illegal sewage discharge, since September 2017, Hebei has made full use of the reform results of vertical management of monitoring, supervision and law enforcement of environmental protection agencies below the provincial level, coordinated environmental monitoring, law enforcement and monitoring forces at the provincial, municipal and county levels, and adopted different law enforcement and cross-enforcement methods to continuously carry out five rounds of special inspectors and law enforcement inspections for comprehensive air pollution control.
Zhang Guisheng, Environmental Inspector of Hebei Provincial Environmental Protection Department, said that in 2017, the province filed a total of 22,060 cases of environmental violations, with a penalty amount of 1.109 billion yuan, up by 192% and 153% respectively compared with 2016, ranking third and second respectively in the country.
Unremitting treatment, in exchange for frequent blue sky. In January and February of 2017, the cumulative concentration of PM2.5 in Hebei was as high as 114 μ g/m3, a year-on-year rebound of 46%; By December 31st, the concentration reached 65 μ g/m3, and the concentration decreased by 7.1% simultaneously.
Hebei proposed that in 2018, a three-year operational plan for air pollution control will be formulated to ensure that air quality "changes every year and achieves great results in three years", and strive to make Shijiazhuang, Hengshui and Tangshan take the lead in withdrawing from the last 10 air quality rankings of 74 cities across the country.