Minister Ni Yuefeng directs the 2nd-round of “Blue Sky 2020” campaign.

On November 3, at 6:00 a.m., under the command of GACC Minister Ni Yuefeng, the second round of “Blue Sky 2020” anti-smuggling campaign was launched in 8 provinces/municipalities by Guangdong Sub-Administration and 11 participating Customs Districts. As a result, this action busted 26 smuggling rings, captured 61 criminal suspects and seized 425,000 tons of illicit inbound waste like metals and slag, in an intensive, clustered and full-chain manner.

In recent years, through closer control and crackdown, it is effective to prevent illicit foreign waste from entry into the country. Besides, China’s import of solid waste reduced substantially from 22.63 million tons of 2018 to 13.48 million tons of 2019 and totaled 6.69 million tons for January-October this year, down 42.7% year-on-year; the seized smuggling cases, also reducing year-by-year, totaled 180 for January-October this year, a decrease of 43.2% year-on-year.

In the next stage, China Customs will further improve and implement the normalized regulatory mechanism on inbound solid waste in cooperation with domestic and foreign authorities: 1. In control of external sources of solid waste, prevent the entry of illicit waste by using the global port monitoring platform for ships and vehicles and conduct special audit on the businesses involved. 2. Keep crackdown on concealed slag smuggling in freight. 3. Implement the amended law on prevention of environmental pollution by solid waste. 4. Together with other administrations, ban the import of solid waste in any way to achieve zero import by the year end, and help local governments with the primary responsibility to legally dispose the inbound waste that is unknown in origin or cannot be returned.