China meets pollution control targets for 2006-2010

BEIJING - China met two major pollution control targets from 2006 to 2010, said the country's environment watchdog on Monday.

The index for sulfur dioxide emissions, the main one for measuring air pollution, dropped 14.29 percent in 2010 compared with the level in 2005, said the Ministry of Environmental Protection in the statement.

Also, the index of Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), a measure of water pollution, decreased 12.45 percent from the level in 2005, the statement said.

China's 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010) set out to reduce COD and sulfur dioxide levels by 10 percent over this period.

According to the statement, the COD totaled 12.38 million tons in 2010, a decrease of 3.09 percent from 2009, while the volume of sulfur dioxide emissions totaled 21.85 million tons, a drop of 1.32 percent from 2009.

The ministry attributed the progress to the installation of desulfurizing facilities in thermal power plants and the building of more sewage plants.

About 82.6 percent of thermal power generators across China were equipped with desulfurizing facility in 2010, up from 12 percent in 2005, the statement said.

In addition, 75 percent of urban sewage were processed in 2010, up from 52 percent in 2005, it said.

During the five years, the country built sewage plants with a total capacity of processing 60 million cubic meters of waste water daily.

Now sewage plants in the urban areas are able to process 125 million cubic meters of sewage every day.

The country also moved to close highly-polluted factories and small thermal power plants.

However, Minister of Environmental Protection Zhou Shengxian warned at a meeting last December that the country's pollution control mission for the next five-year period (2011-2015) will be "fairly arduous" as major pollutant emissions remained huge and new pollution sources emerged.