More than 1 million cases of pollution in the past five years have resulted in charges and fines of about NT$5.6 billion (US$185 million), the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday.
About 9.23 million reports of pollution have been investigated and more than 1.16 million cases have resulted in charges, the agency said.
The Bureau of Environmental Inspection’s statistics showed that of the 1.16 million cases that resulted in charges, more than 690,000 were corporate cases incurring about NT$3.8 billion in fines.
Bureau director Chen Hsien-heng (陳咸亨) said most of the illegal practices resulted from companies acting at their own discretion or having management problems.
In the more serious cases, the companies were forced to halt operations, with personnel sentenced, he added.
Chen said that one company in Greater Tainan continued polluting nearby pomelo farmlands through broken pipes, failing to improve the situation until the company was fined 130 times, making it the largest number issued to one company.
The biggest corporate fines imposed were NT$440 million on Hualien County’s Heping Village (和平) coal-burning power plant and NT$130 million on Taoyuan’s Kuanyin Industrial Park (觀音工業區), he added.
Individuals tended to fall foul of the rules by littering and improper waste disposal, Chen said.
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