News from the Beijing Municipal Environment Bureau is that Beijing has allocated a CNY200 million special fund this year to eliminate vehicles with high emission.

According to BMEB, Beijing is the first city in China that compensates car owners for not using highly polluting cars, and the first batch of 225 high emission cars marked with yellow signs have been eliminated from the city's streets with their owners receiving a total of up to CNY2 million subsidy.

Li Kunsheng, director of the Vehicle Emission Management Division of BMEB, said that the municipal government attaches great importance to the rectification of yellow sign vehicles and has set up a special team to deal with the issue. Li disclosed that eliminating high emission vehicles would be the most important tasks for the environment department to reduce air pollution this year. It is expected that 106,000 of these vehicles will be destroyed before the end of March 2009 and 280,000 will be trashed by the end of this year.

The incentive policy of compensating yellow sign vehicle owners to stop using their vehicle will last for one year.

At present, there are 3.5 million vehicles in Beijing, of which 353,800 are high emission ones marked with yellow signs and they account for half of the pollution of the city. Li said that the elimination of these vehicles will reduce the capital's pollution by 30%.