Steel cuts in China to vary from mill to mill

Production cuts in China’s steel sector will vary from mill to mill in autumn and winter, said an environmental ministry official, as the country shifts away from a “one size fits all” approach to fighting pollution.

The state council said in July that 82 cities required to take special antismog measures over autumn and winter and would be able to draw up their own plans for those steps.

“This year, production curbs will definitely be differentiated based on the emission level at each steel mill,” Liu Bingjiang, director of the air environmental management department at the ministry of environment and ecology said on Saturday.

Industrial plants in the steel, cement and primary aluminium sectors in 28 northern cities were ordered to cut up to 50% of their capacity last winter as part of the government’s years-long “war on pollution”.

But some local officials simply imposed blanket production suspensions on all industrial enterprises regardless of their emission levels, stoking some public discontent.

The ministry said in May it planned to end the “one size fits all” approach to fighting pollution and promised to give local regulators enough time to make their own plan rather than imposing orders from above.

“Differentiated measures will give companies more incentives to improve their emission levels,” Wu Jianjun, director of the air pollution department at the Tangshan Environmental Bureau, said.

Tangshan, China’s top steelmaking city, will hire a thirdparty institute to assess emission levels at mills and will implement curbs based on those results, Wu said.

Detailed production restriction plans for winter have not been issued in Tangshan, in the province of Hebei, but the rates are expected to be higher than in 2017, according to Wu.

“Environmental measures will be more and more stringent until at least 2020,” he said.