According to Bureau of Environmental Protection of GuangZhou Municipality, to prevent newly-opened restaurants from disturbing their neighboring residents with cooking fumes, Guangzhou has begun to implement an environmental evaluation on the programs in the catering service industry.

Currently, Bureau of Environmental Protection of districts (or county-level cities) in Guangzhou are responsible for examining and approving the environmental qualification of the catering programs in Guangzhou. In 2010, a total of 4,366 catering programs were denied due to violation of the relevant laws and regulations such as ‘restaurants can’t be opened in buildings including residential floors or in places less than five meters away from residential buildings’, failure to meet the requirements of land utilization and urban planning, construction in water conservation area or existence of environmental dangers.

There are 40,000 catering businesses registered in Guangzhou, but no less than 10000 complaints were lodged to the Environmental Protection Hotline 12369 last year, and 48 percent of the complaints were about disturbances caused by cooking fumes and/or noise.

According to the Department of Environmental Protection, the focus of managing the catering environment is still mainly centered on old urban areas, and the difficulty lies in managing the restaurants which have been operating for years, run without certificate or change certificates to avoid punishment. Environmental pollution also includes the noises caused by setting tables on the road, customers’ shouting, playing the finger game and running of air blower and hot air emitted by air conditioners from these restaurants. All of these disturbances underscore why ongoing environmental evaluation inspections are very important.

Yang Liu, from the Department of Environmental Protection, said that the on-line monitoring of cooking fumes has been put in place in the downtown area and restaurants with more than 200 tables in Yuexiu District are now receiving remote monitoring. Such a measure will spread to other districts soon.