The legislature came closer to approving the budget to implement Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) plans to charge industrial water pollution fees after the proposal passed its first reading on Thursday.
The program was first included in the Water Pollution Protection Act (水污染防治法) passed in 2002. However, funding has been frozen by the legislature for seven years, which EPA officials attribute to a reluctance to increase fees in the lagging economic environment.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Sue-ying (黃淑英) on Thursday criticized previous decisions to freeze funding to implement the program as an example of lawmakers catering to the demands of big industry.
“More than 80 percent of the collected fees would come from large corporations,” Huang said.
The fees could be implemented in July, with the first payments collected in January 2011. They would be subject to a sliding scale, officials said, based on pollutant density, amount and type.
Once fully phased in — a process that is expected to take six years, with 50 percent discounts at the beginning, the tax is expected to generate revenue of more than NT$600 million (US$18.7 million) annually, which officials said would decrease over time.
“The goal of this program is to create incentives for industries to lower their amounts of water pollution,” Chen Shyan-heng (陳咸亨), director general of the EPA’s Department of Water Quality Protection, said yesterday. “The funds collected will go toward treating water pollution as well as subsidizing local environmental agencies.”
EPA statistics say an estimated 1,130 tonnes of BOD (biochemical oxygen demand) — a standard used in measuring polluted water — is emitted daily, with 53 percent coming from household waste, 22 percent from industries and 31 percent from the agricultural sector.
Officials from the Water Quality Protection department said that fees could result in a 4 percent to 34 percent decrease in industrial BOD.
They said the fees would affect about 12,000 industries, but 80 percent of them would pay less than NT$10,000 the first year.
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