The latest revision on the Environmental Protection Law of China was made in 2014 and took effect since Jan 1st 2015. The newly revised law was regarded as the toughest environmental protection law that China ever had because of several features. From the administrative aspect, the law designated the local government, instead of the local environmental protection bureau, responsible for the local environmental quality. This made it a rather important task for higher or senior officials to improve the environmental quality as their political careers are at stake. From the aspect of enterprises, the law empowered the authorities to pose accumulative fines on them or even shut them down if they exceeded the emission limits. Both administrative and financial measures were supposed to be effective weapons in the law’s arsenal.
However, according to a survey conducted by the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), there are still about 30% of the industrial enterprises are emitting pollutants above the required limits. As a result, MEP published a draft revision on the Measures on Daily-based Penalties of Environmental Protection Authorities on May 18th 2017 and proposed to make the penalty measures even harsher. The revisions include:
The scope of violations is expanded. “Emission of the pollutants which are not included in the pollutants emission permit” is added into the violations. Because some particular pollutants of certain enterprises may not appear in the local emission standards, so the authorities used to lack legal basis to control the emission. But now that the pollutants emission permit system was established as the core environmental protection system, every enterprise had to include their pollutants into the permit. So now they are responsible for these pollutants and the overall scope of penalties is hugely expanded.
The former Measures on Daily-based Penalties stipulated that the environmental protection authorities should re-examine the emission situation of enterprises in 30 days after they required the enterprises to rectify. The draft revision removes the “30 days” and allows the authorities to re-examine anytime they want. So the enterprises cannot take advantage of the loophole by reducing the emission for 30 days and going back to usual.
The goal of this revision clearly is to give environmental protection authorities more power to control and penalize the pollutants emission. More types of emission and more enterprises will be affected. The revision is now open to public feedback until Jun 18th 2017.
