Shanghai’s air quality was slightly better last year but vehicle emissions remain a major pollutant, local environmental supervisors said on Friday.

There were 328 days with excellent or good air quality, four days more than 2006, but the overall amount air pollutants, mainly chemicals and particulates, was almost the same, they said.

"It's a difficult job to control the increase of pollutants while the city develops rapidly," Lin Chenyuan, a senior engineer of Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center, said.

(Shanghai Daily January 7, 2008)