China has ordered steel and aluminium producers in 28 cities to slash output during the winter months as Beijing intensifies its war on smog, according to a Bloomberg News report on Wednesday.
In an order issued in February, the state planner and the Ministry of Environment called on steel producers to halve output in four major cities, including top producer Tangshan in Hebei province, according to a report by Bloomberg that cited unidentified people with knowledge of the matter.
Producers must also cut capacity to produce aluminium and alumina, an ingredient used to make the metal, by more than 30 percent across 28 cities, according to the order issued by authorities including the Ministry of Environmental Protection(MEP) and the National Development and Reform Commission, the report said.
The order comes after the MEP proposed these measures, as well as other more stringent steps, in a draft policy document seen by Reuters that would be among Beijing's most radical moves so far to tackle air quality in the country's most polluted cities.
In that draft document, the MEP had also recommended banning coal in one of the country's top ports, Tianjin, and shutting some fertiliser and drug plants. It's not clear whether the order issued in February included those measures.
