TIANJIN, May 30 (Xinhua) -- North China's Tianjin Municipality will strive to improve its air quality this year with a spate of actions in reducing coal use and industrial pollution.
Yang Yong, an official with the Tianjin Ecology and Environment Bureau, said more efforts will be made to reduce more emissions of air pollutants this year.
Local authorities will help the remaining 420,000 rural households switch to clean energy and eliminate coal boilers for winter heating within 15 km of coal-fired power plants with a power generating capacity of over 300 MW, Yang said.
Authorities will also increase the proportion of railway transport of iron ore and other merchandise and renovate coal-fired power plants and steel mills for lower pollutant emissions, he said.
Tianjin has set the PM2.5 control target at 51 micrograms per cubic meter for 2019, with the number of heavily-polluted days one quarter less from 2015.
The average concentration of PM2.5, a key indicator of air pollution, fell 16.1 percent year on year to 52 micrograms per cubic meter in 2018, meeting the 2020 target two years ahead of schedule.
