Twenty-five days from now, on December 1, Dezhou bans China-I-and-below non-road mobile machinery across its entire administrative area, and yard vehicles at China-III or below go out of service the same day. The city government’s press briefing on November 5 unveiled the new version of its high-emission non-road machinery prohibition zones, retiring the January 2023 document it replaces.
The second shoe drops on July 1, 2027: the ban widens from built-up districts to the whole city, and machines rated China-II or below – or whose exhaust opacity exceeds the Class III limit in GB 36886-2018 – become unusable everywhere.
Two dates, two steps
Step one starts December 1: China-I-and-below machines and China-III-and-below yard vehicles are barred citywide, while built-up districts, town government seats and key sites – construction sites, mines, logistics parks, industrial plants, ports, airports and rail freight yards – additionally bar China-II-and-below machines or any machine above the Class III opacity limit. Step two, on July 1, 2027, extends that second category across the whole city. The equipment list is long: loaders, excavators, bulldozers, rollers, forklifts, cranes, air compressors – and generator sets. Agricultural machines such as tractors and combine harvesters are excluded. The legal basis is Article 230 of the Ecology and Environment Code, which lets county-level and above governments designate such zones.
The tracker is on; the hotline is open
The ban does not rely on roadside inspections alone. Environmental authorities have already fitted machines with GPS units that raise an automatic alert when a high-emission machine enters a prohibited area. Each machine carries a painted eco-code – Ring 1 means China-I, Ring 2 means China-II – so anyone can spot an offender. Reports go through the 12345 government hotline, and Article 1127 of the Code sets the penalty: correction ordered, 5,000 yuan per machine. Division of labor is spelled out too – the environment department manages registration, while housing, transport, water and city-management authorities run site-entry logs in the venues they oversee.
Ring-2 machines have seven months left
The two-step design buys owners seven months, but machines do not clean themselves. Excess opacity is usually a maintenance debt; the same machine can land on either side of the GB 36886 line before and after a service. For worksites, ports and freight yards dense with equipment, the economical order is maintenance first, then – for machines that still smoke – retrofitting or replacing pollution control devices and retesting, the path Guangzhou’s measures formalize from November 9. The non-road exhaust gas purifier from AIFILTECH is fitted machine by machine for excavators and loaders, and the generator set black smoke purifier addresses the on-site power station written into the same list. Shandong is tightening fast this season: orange alerts in early November, zone upgrades in December, a province-wide deadline next July – the calendar itself is the countdown.
