Environmental violators fined more than 13 billion yuan

China collected administrative fines of almost 13.6 billion yuan from more than 166,000 environmental violations across the country in the first 11 months this year, the country top environmental watchdog said. 

According to a media release from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment on Tuesday, the total amount of fines from East China's Jiangsu province topped the ranking list with a fine of 1.973 billion yuan, followed by South China's Guangdong province with 1.537 billion yuan and North China's Heibei province with a total 1.253 billion yuan.

The ministry didn't disclose the amount of fines for the same period last year, but said five types of penalties went down, both in the number of cases and the amount of fines, including penalties calculated on a daily basis, production suspension, detention and criminal penalties. 

From January to November, cumulative daily fines, for example, were imposed on 691 of the violations, down by almost 34 percent year-on-year. The amount of fines collected from such violations went down by about 8.4 percent, the release said.