ISLAMABAD, July 13: The Senate Standing Committee on Housing, Works and Environment on Thursday directed the Ministry of Environment to design plans aimed at controlling industrial pollution in rural and urban areas.
The committee passed this direction at a briefing on industrial pollution control programme and the steps taken by the Ministry of Environment to check the hazardous impact of the industrial waste, said a statement.
Secretary, Ministry of Environment on the occasion informed the Committee that poisonous emissions from textile, fertiliser, cement, steel melting and sugar industries were heavily polluting air as well as water.
He said that parameters had been developed under National Environment Quality Standards (NEQS) for liquid and gaseous pollutants for which the initial response from industrial sector was not encouraging.
He informed the members that after discussions, the industrial sector had agreed to invest approximately Rs800 million per year in environment protection measures.
He said the Asian Development Bank had offered $100 million loan for establishing six combined effluent treatment plants to treat 65 per cent of the total industrial waste.
The secretary informed the committee that World Trade Organization (WTO) had linked trade with environment and the products processed under environment friendly process were certified under ISO-14000.
It had become an international obligation to check and control the pollution caused by the industrial units which would have a positive impact on exports, he added.
He said the Ministry of Environment had requested various UN agencies to send a team of experts to assess environmental damage in the earthquake hit zones and suggest necessary plan of action.
He said that a comprehensive Recovery and Rehabilitation Plan had been chalked out and discussed with the stakeholders in detail. The meeting learnt that the focus had been laid on the institutional capacity building, waste management and natural resource management, and the draft recovery plan was also forwarded to ERRA, the governments of AJK and NWFP.
The progress on hospital waste management project was also discussed in detail and the committee was informed that a project costing Rs4,250 million was launched in collaboration with various organizations. The project would highlight threats posed by unsound existing rules and guidelines, and data on health care facilities had been consolidated under this project.
It was informed that though the major hospitals in the country had installed incinerators for waste disposal, these plants were not working properly.
On the issue of clean drinking water project, it was told that the government had allocated Rs2 billion last year to install 544 filtration plants at district and tehsil levels.