By Zhang Hui

A total of 40,621 "yellow-label cars," or heavy-polluting vehicles, have been taken off the road as of Friday, which means Beijing has fulfilled this year's task of clearing out 40,000 such vehicles ahead of schedule, environmental protection authorities said Tuesday.

"We expect another 10,000 yellow-label cars to be cleaned up by the end of this year," Du Shaozhong, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau said during a press conference.   

Among the 40,621, 34,000 vehicles were scrapped and 6,500 were moved to second or third-tier cities where emission standards are lower, Du said.

The clean-up campaign launched in 2009 removed a total of over 150,000 yellow-label cars in two years.

The result was the eradication of 315 tons of major pollutants, including 245 tons of carbon monoxide, 35 tons of hydrocarbon and 32 tons of nitrogen oxide, Du said.

"But Beijing still has over 40,000 yellow-label cars on the road even after the 150,000 were cleaned up," Li Kunsheng, the bureau's vehicle management department director told reporters Tuesday.

Yellow-label cars were prohibited from entering the Sixth Ring Road starting on October 1, 2009, Li said, and the road restrictions will continue in the following years.

A government subsidy for residents who reported and replaced their yellow-label cars will end by January next year, but the government will continue its project of eliminating heavy-polluting vehicles, Li said.

The city implemented National IV emission standards in March 2008, which have reduced 15 to 20 percent of vehicle exhaust in total, Wang Xiaoming, spokesman of the bureau, told the Global Times.

"We are now drawing up the National V emission standards, and they are likely to be put into use in 2012," Li said. Yellow-label vehicles cannot even meet National I emission standards from before 1995.

The number of vehicles in Beijing increased from 2.58 million in 2005 to 4.6 million this year, but the government has controlled exhaust levels, claims the bureau's release.

Additional measures taken to reduce vehicle pollution included deploying 22 monitoring vehicles to randomly check vehicle emissions on the streets and implementing measures at gas stations to  reduce a possible loss of 20,000 tons of volatile organic gas every year, according to the press release.