China Consults on 11 Environmental Protection National Standards

11 mandatory national standards for environmental protection are proposed to be formulated or revised, involving packaging and printing air pollution, non-hazardous industrial solid waste, medical waste, etc.

On June 16, the Standardization Administration of China published a batch of proposed mandatory national standard projects ^[1]seeking comments from the public. All the 11 standards, which are to be formulated or revised, are under the authority of Ministry of Environment and Ecology and are designed to enhance environmental management capacities. Public comments shall be submitted before June 30.

The below table shows the basic information of these standards.

Table 1. Information of the standards to be formulated or revised

No.	Project Name	Formulation/Revision
1	Standard for pollution control on medical waste	Formulation
2	Emission standards of oil fume pollutants for cooking	Revision
3	Discharge standard of water pollutants for food processing and manufacturing industry	Formulation
4	Effluent standard of pollutants for fermented alcohol and alcoholic drinks manufacturing industry	Revision
5	Standard for pollution control on the non-hazardous industrial solid waste storage and disposal facility	Revision
6	Emission standard of air pollutants for electronics industry	Formulation
7	Discharge standard of water pollutants for textile industry	Revision
8	Standards for irrigation water quality	Revision
9	Characterization of low level radioactive waste packages — cemented waste	Formulation
10	Emission standard of air pollutants for printing industry	Formulation
11	Comprehensive emission standards of atmospheric pollutants	Revision

The current national standard on air pollutant emission control for the printing industry is GB 16297-1996 Integrated emission standard of air pollutants. The currently effective standard is outdated and cannot support the current requirements of full process control of VOCs. The new standard to be formulated will provide updated requirements for air pollutants emission control in the printing industry. At the same time, the comprehensive emission standards of atmospheric pollutants will be revised. The current version lacks technical requirements for fugitive emission, needs a more effective and convenient calculation method, and needs to align with the published monitoring and analysis standards.