Current smog caused by local pollutants: expert

Local pollutants including traffic and industrial emissions are the main reason behind the current spell of smog in Beijing, environment experts said after the Chinese capital issued a blue alert for air pollution for the next three days.

The Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau on Wednesday issued a blue alert, the lowest in a four-tier alert system on pollution, and said that the smog will last for at least three days due to the unfavorable weather conditions and the accumulation of pollutants.

This is the second time for Beijing to be besieged by heavy smog in November.

More than one-tenth of the country was blanked by heavy smog last weekend, according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP).

The ministry said that the latest smog was caused by straw and coal burning in the Northeast China, according to a press release sent to the Global Times by the MEP.

However, Liu Yuanhai, deputy chief of the Heilongjiang Provincial Environmental Monitoring Center, was quoted by the Technology Daily as saying that "the conclusion is too hasty and it lacks scientific basis including monitoring statistics and analysis on modeling."

Wang Gengchen, a research fellow from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the Global Times on Thursday that "the local sources of pollutants in Beijing are responsible for the new wave of hazardous smog and only a little amount of pollutants from straw burning could reach Beijing because of the atmospheric circulation."

"One of the main pollutants are the large number of vehicle exhaust, given that there are more than 5.7 million registered vehicles in Beijing; and another is industrial emission including the annual coal burning that reaches more than 20 million tons a year," said Wang.

The current smog has forced Hebei Province, which has been regarded as a major source of Beijing air pollutants, to issue a first-ever "dispatching order" over air pollution on Wednesday, thepaper.cn reported.

The "dispatching order," which is usually issued for disaster relief, urged all districts across the province to reinforce emergency response and measurements against the heavy smog, according to the report.