(ECNS) -- The capital is set to build a batch of soil monitoring stations as the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau selects suitable sites, Beijing News has reported.
The site selection and samples testing results will be reported to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, which aims to better understand the soil situation in China as part of its efforts to curb contamination.
Details like how many stations Beijing will build, how often the bureau would collect soil samples for testing, and whether it will share the information with the public, have not been finalized yet, the newspaper states.
In April 2014, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Land Resources released a report based on a national soil survey, which found that 16.1 percent of China's soil, and 19.4 percent of its farmland, was polluted, mostly as a result of industrial and agricultural activities. The most common pollutants were cadmium, nickel and arsenic.
