Zhou Shengxian, director of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), said at a conference all the projects that release non-biodegradable pollutants would be banned along the Songhua River.

"Stricter standards on iron and steel projects will be implemented to control the rapid growth of projects that consume large amounts of energy and cause serious pollution," said Zhou.

By the end of this year, all the small paper mills and chemical plants along the river will be shut down. And the construction of waste water treatment facilities will be accelerated, Zhou added.

The 1,900-km-long Songhua River originates in Jilin Province and its water is used to irrigate 545,600 sq km of farmland in northeast China. It is a tributary of the Heilong River, which turns into the Amur River in Russia.

There have been frequent reports of pollution in the river and its tributaries in recent years.

Ten tons of toxic chemicals were dumped into Songhua's tributary Mangniu River in Jilin by two truck drivers from Changbaishan Jingxi Chemical Company last August.

In November 2005, about 100 tons of polluted waste containing benzene spilled into the Songhua River after a chemical plant explosion in Jilin. The incident forced cities along the river, including Heilongjiang's provincial capital Harbin, to temporarily cut water supplies to 3.8 million people.

"In a recent secret investigation of 82 polluting enterprises along the river, SEPA found that more than 80 percent of them had released pollutants exceeding national standards," said Zhu Xingxiang, director of the environment evaluation department of SEPA.

"We'll focus on controlling the new sources of pollution in the coming year," Zhu said.

SEPA aims to keep the water quality of the river stable until 2008, and significantly improve the water quality by 2010, according to Zhu.

Central and local governments have invested 7.75 billion yuan (about one billion U.S. dollars) in 116 pollution control projects in the region since 2006, including building waste water treatment plants and setting up a remote sensing system to monitor water pollution.

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