Henan provincial Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) published its steel industry waste emission requirements on 11 February, Kallanish notes.

China has already announced the implementation of improved steel emission standards that are expected to be effective later this year. The Henan EPA notice says that the standards will be effective as from 1 October 2018. A similar set of low waste emission standards will also be applied for local coking mills as from 1 October 2019.

The standards state that steel mills are supposed to complete the upgrading of their sintering plants’ waste emissions’ systems before the end of October this year. Following the upgrade, the sintering process’ solid waste, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions concentration should be lower than 20mg/m³, 50mg/m³ and 150mg/m³ respectively.

Uncontrolled emissions by local steel mills should also be rectified before end of August 2018 according to the announcement. Henan produced 29.5 million tonnes of crude steel in 2017.