Daid Masters of Fair Home has an interesting article this week that highlights a program to pay business to reduce their pollution.
According to the article:
Authorities in the Chinese capital are offering companies up to 2.3 million yuan ($340,000) in bonuses in an attempt to clean up the dirty air in the city.
The Finance Bureau of Beijing said the bonuses are intended to stimulate environmentally friendly economies, helping them to replace big polluters.
Offering incentives is not a new approach by any means, but to see this program come online does peak my interest as there are currently schemes in place to help businesses buy equipment that will reduce pollution and/ or increase efficiencies (scrubbers, water filtration, etc).
However, when looking at the fact that they are focused on small scale cement and paper producers though seems odd. the article says that they big savings are there, and whlie I would certainly agree that the big problems are most likely found there, I would have hoped that these incentives would have been focused on large producers first to prove the case… and then develop the case for large producers (who have greened themselves) to work with smaller producers.
Alternatively, by encouraging the development of large firms through M&A, and then working with these firms throughout the process to improve, that would potentially provide a much better solution as well.