Shaanxi's anti-pollution steps turn Tongchuan's sky blue

Tongchuan city in Shaanxi province, which used to suffer from serious air pollution due to its heavy coal and cement production, got 269 blue sky days in 2015, thanks to the continuous effort of environmental improvement and protection.

According to Wan Shuiku, director of Tongchuan environment protection administration bureau, the city government continuously invested 1.38 billion yuan ($210.4 million) from late 1980s to control the air pollution and improve the environment and got great progress.

As a result, the city witnessed 229 days of good-quality weather in 2014 and 269 days in 2015, according to the new standards of air quality (GB3095-2012) and had continuously witnessed 300 days of blue sky in a year since 2008.

Wan said that the good quality air in the city was achieved by implementing several measures including control of coal consumption, installation of environmental protection facilities and control of pollution emissions.

The city used natural gas to replace the coal as heating and cooking fuels and changed the idea that the city of coal production should use coal as its fuel for living and production.

“During the past decade, we removed 611 coal-fired boilers and built 933 gas-fired boilers. And the city's gasification rate reached 88 percent,” Wan said.

And the local government also paid 36.6 million yuan ($5.56 million) for 93,900 poverty-stricken families to use natural gas for heating and cooking in the past 10 years.

The city government also urged and supported the local enterprises of coal, cement, electric power and ceramics to install environmental protection facilities for desulfurization, denitrification and dust-control in order to completely control the air and water pollution, Wan said.

In the past decade, 57 backward cement production lines were removed and 201 lime factories and 62 stone slag plants were closed.

With the effort, Tongchuan, one of the most important coal production base in the country and the largest cement production base in northwest China, which could not be seen from satellite in 1980s because of covering by heavy air pollution, has become a city enjoying clean and water.