Problems in the implementation of China Cleaner Production Promotion Law and the improvement approaches

China Cleaner Production Promotion Law is the world?s first special law for cleaner production, which has played an important role in guiding and regulating cleaner production in China for 17 years of implementation. In current stage, the green development and environmental management in China put forward many more requests to cleaner production. However, the defects of the law become increasingly obvious, such as the definition of cleaner production, cleaner production audit system and the incentive measures. In view of the whole-process control, the adverse effect on promoting the idea of cleaner production and the technology development that brought by the narrow definition was analyzed. Aiming at the problems that the mandatory cleaner production audit system did not meet the current environmental management objectives and the incentive measures could not effectively play a guiding role, suggestions on improvement approaches were put forward, including strengthening the whole-process control idea, cancelling the scope of mandatory cleaner production audit and targeting cleaner production audit at emissions reduction, clarifying the normalization of the acceptance procedures, strengthening the business guidance for cleaner production audit institutions, and establishing coordinated propulsion mechanism of regional cleaner production. Some cleaner production incentive measures were also suggested, including the implementation of tax preferences and financial credit support for enterprises that achieved significant resources, environment and economic benefits through cleaner production, and the simplification of the procedures of environmental impact assessment, and the setting-up of model enterprises.