China is quite serious about getting rid of high-emission vehicles. It has several bonuses. It builds up a large potential export market, it cuts down on pollution – and this is already happening, it will generally make life a lot more pleasant and give China some credit in the green conscious world.
Li Xinmin, an official with the Ministry of Environmental Protection, said, "The automobile emissions have become main sources of air pollution in Chinese large and medium-sized cities.
"High-emission cars and trucks only make up 28% of all automobiles in China, but they are responsible for 75% of the pollutant emissions."
Automobiles which fail to meet the National Emission Standard I, equivalent to the Euro I standard, are listed as high-emission vehicles in China. And there are too many of them.
Standard I means an average petrol sedan will emit a maximum of 2.7 grams of carbon monoxide a kilometer among other exhausts. Standard IV, the good end of the market, requires less than 1 gram of carbon monoxide and 0.08 gram of nitrogen oxide per kilometer.
China introduced Standards I, II and III respectively in 2000, 2005, and 2007. Standard IV is scheduled to be adopted nationwide in 2010.
To get an idea of the range the pollutant amount discharged by a high-emission vehicle is 30 times as much as a Standard IV automobile.
China had more than 64 million automobiles by the end of 2008, among which 18 million were high-emission vehicles.
China Daily reports that during the Olympics and Paralympics last year, Beijing limited the use of most vehicles through an odd-even license plate system. The initiative took 45% of the cars off the roads and helped keep skies clean.
In April, the city implemented a new restriction, also based on license plates, which forces a fifth of privately-owned vehicles off the roads each week day. Expect a lot more of this.