Six Chinese companies have been fined US$26 million for discharging tens of thousands of tonnes of waste chemicals into rivers, state media said, the biggest such penalty ever in China.
The firms in Taizhou in eastern Jiangsu Province were sued by a local environmental protection organization and found to have dumped 25,000 tonnes of waste hydrochloric acid into two rivers, Xinhua news agency reported.
A court in the city ordered the companies to pay 160 million yuan (US$26 million) in fines last year — the highest-ever penalty in Chinese environmental public interest litigation — and a higher court upheld the punishment on Tuesday, it said.
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In August, 14 people involved in the case were sentenced by another court to prison terms of two to five years for causing environmental pollution, it added.
The previous heaviest penalty for polluting the environment was a fine of 37.14 million yuan meted out to three defendants in neighboring Shandong Province, also for contaminating rivers, according to an earlier report by the Southern Weekly newspaper.
Three decades of rapid and unfettered industrial expansion have taken a heavy toll on the country’s environment and Chinese Communist Party leaders have been concerned by an increasing number of angry protests over the issue.
Recent studies have shown that roughly two-thirds of China’s soil is estimated to be polluted and that 60 percent of underground water is too contaminated to drink.
Meanwhile, residents of big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai are regularly confronted with hazardous smog levels.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) announced in March that the country was “declaring war” against pollution, and a series of measures have been announced, but questions remain over enforcement.
China in April amended its environmental protection law — the first such move in 25 years — imposing tougher penalties and pledging that violators will be “named and shamed.”
Yet holding polluters legally accountable has proved difficult in a country where local governments are often focused on driving growth.
Amid the push to crack down on pollution, China’s environmental regulators nearly doubled the number of cases they referred to police involving suspected polluters over the first three-quarters of last year compared with all of 2013, state media reported last month.
Xinhua said environmental agencies also penalized about 190,000 enterprises for violating environmental laws over the past two years.
In total, Xinhua said Chinese authorities have investigated and handed down punishments in 103,707 cases over the past two years. They issued about US$633 million in fines during that period.
Xinhua said environment regulators transferred 1,232 cases involving suspected environmental crimes to police over the first three-quarters of last year, compared with 706 all of 2013.
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