BEIJING, March 4 (Xinhua) -- Authorities in eastern China's Jiangsu Province have closed about 3,000 heavily polluting factories to protect the Yangtze River, China's longest river, since 2016, Monday's China Daily reported.
The province has been committed to tackling industrial pollution to improve the water quality of the Yangtze River, which runs for around 400 km through Jiangsu and provides about 80 percent of the water used for drinking and industrial production.
Luo Qun, deputy secretary of the Party working committee of Jiangbei New Area in Nanjing, the provincial capital, was quoted by the paper as saying that effective measures have been taken to curb chemical pollution in the area, which is home to many chemical factories and industrial parks.
"Environmental protection is one of our most important tasks," Luo said. "We have reduced the area covered by industrial parks from 45 square kilometers to 20 and closed all the factories that didn't meet environmental protection standards."
In August last year, Jiangsu released a plan to close all industrial parks that fail to meet environmental protection standards by 2020.
Local authorities also pledged to reduce production of crude steel and eliminate more than 2 million kilowatts of outdated coal-fired power generators.
