Liaoning Province will close over 200 small paper-making plants along the Liaohe River basin this year and try to remove the stinky smell from 10 branches of the Liaohe River over the next three years.

Wang Bingjie, director of Liaoning Provincial Environment Department, said that by closing down these paper-making plants, they would eliminate about 400,000 tons of backward production capacities and through straightening out a batch of major polluters, they expect that the 10 seriously-polluted branches of the Liaohe River would eventually become clean.

In addition to shutting down the paper plants, enterprises of seven industries, including metallurgy, chemical, medicine, petroleum, nonmetal mining and textile will be listed as the first batch of targets for rectification.

Featuring a total area of 69200 square kilometers, Liaohe River Basin is one of the seven major river basins in China. There are several heavy industry cities along the river with over one thousand big polluter enterprises, which has made the basin the most seriously-polluted one among all the river basins in China.