China's Environmentally Friendly Enterprise Program: A New Approach to Industrial Pollution Prevention and Energy Efficiency in China

China’s environment is facing increasing challenges from its rapid economic development, despite achieving a level of compliance with existing laws and regulations. Besides strengthening its current regulatory activities in environmental management, the government has also introduced new approaches of preventing pollution and improving resource efficiency in order to protect China’s eco-environment and non-renewable resources. For designing and implementing the new approaches, lessons can be learned from the successful experience of incentive environmental management and series voluntary government-industry partnership programs in USA. Based on the outputs of the cooperative project between the China State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) and USEPA, “Sino-US Partnership in Industrial Pollution Prevention and Energy Efficiency”, SEPA has issued a new program, “China Environmentally Friendly Enterprise (CEFE) Program”, to honor the excellent enterprises that have manifested top environmental performance in China. All kinds of industrial enterprises can apply for the recognition as CEFE voluntarily committing to improve their environmental performance to exceed the current regulations and standards so as to be the environmental leaders in the corresponding sectors. Conferred by the national government, CEFE is the highest award in environmental protection for an enterprise in China. In this article, the background, characteristics, criteria and indicators of CEFE will be explained, and the progress of the program as well as some cases of the new CEFE membership enterprises will be introduced.