To remediate the soil and ground water pollution in Taiwan, the Environmental Protection Agency has begun the collection of the soil and groundwater pollution remediation fee from the manufacturers and importers of officially announced substances in accordance with the amounts of manufactured and imported by such enterprises. A total of 7.9 billion NT dollars of remediation fee had been collected in the past 10 years. Since, the officially announced chemical substances are mainly organic substances; the remediation fund is mainly collected from the petrochemical industry. Therefore, the industry continued to reflect that the fee sources should be more fair and reasonable. In response with the industries’ demands and to reflect the current statures of illegal dumping sites, a new version of the collection regulations was implemented in the July of 2010. Other than the originally regulated substances, steel, coal, copper, nickel, and industrial wastes from 13 industries were included in the regulated substances. The refunding mechanism of manufactured chemicals was also canceled. After the revision, the number of fee-payers has increased from 1,200 to 4,500. The amount of remediation fee collected each quarter has increased to 252 million NT dollars, mainly due to the cancelation of refund of manufactured chemicals. The portion of organic chemicals in the remediation fee collected was reduced to 67%, and the portion of heavy metal and wastes remediation fee collected has increased to 33%, making the proportion of chemicals in the remediation fee more rational. This year, 600 site inspections were completed, from which a total of 8.94 million dollars was recovered. The targets of these inspections were mostly copper and coal importers who had never paid for the remediation fee. Advocacy of the regulation and strengthening of the verification mechanism is needed to prevent companies from avoiding the remediation fee. Collection of remediation fee from generation of industrial waste was first added after this revision; even though varies arguments had occurred, they were solved in a case by case manner. The online-reporting system and the auditing-database were also updated to provide a more convenient reporting process to the fee-payers. To reduce the administration cost of auditing, the auditing process was simplified in 2013.

Soil and groundwater;Remediation Fees;Internet Application