国内英语新闻:China mulls new green production laws

BEIJING, Feb. 27 (Xinhua) -- Senior Chinese legislators on Monday started their second deliberation on a draft amendment to the country's Law on the Promotion of Clean Production.

At the three-day bimonthly session of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), legislators are scheduled to review the newly submitted draft amendment, which has introduced a few key changes after several rounds of opinion gathering.

The new draft highlights a concise definition on the "excessive packaging of products" and a list of detailed conditions under which compulsory clean production checks should be imposed on enterprises, said Sun Anmin, vice chairman of the NPC Law Committee.

Sun briefed lawmakers on the draft amendment at Monday's session, which was chaired by top legislator Wu Bangguo.

The second draft also proposed new arrangements on the allocation of responsibilities between the central and local governments, optimized the official plans for such promotional work at various administrative levels and specified the use of funds from central government, according to Sun.

Another notable change proposed in the two drafts was the repeated insertions of terms such as "resource conservation" and "efficiency," while the present laws sometimes only focus on reduction of pollution.

The drafts also provided a national clean production examination system and calls for greater financial support from the central government.

Chinese legislators believe that the current law, which came into effect in 2003, needs to be revised to meet the requirements on energy conservation and emissions control in the country's bid to build a greener and more sustainable economy.

The NPC Standing Committee's review on the previous draft took place last October.