OREANDA-NEWS. February 14, 2012. Hebei Province will carry out the most stringent environmental standards nationwide in order to force local steelmakers into clean production.

The government has recently unveiled a regional standard on the discharge of air pollutants by the steel industry, which contains 22 constraint provisions. In this regulation, four emission limits are raised for the first time in China on the discharge of nitrogen oxides.

Among the other 18 emission limits, 16 are above the national standards and the remaining two are of equal to the national criteria. This means a total of nine indexes are identical to world advanced levels. Hebei produces about a quarter of the countryбпs steel output. Last year the province made 165 million tons of crude steel and 154 million tons of pig iron.