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 manufactured and imported by such enterprises. A total of 9.8 billion NT dollars of remediation fee had been collected in the past 10 years. The remediation fund is used in the soil and ground water investigations and remediation projects, providing undeniable benefits to environmental protection. 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’ demand and to reflect the current statures of illegal dumping sites, a new version of the collection regulation was implemented in July of 2011. Other than the originally regulated substances, steel, coal, copper, nickel, and industrial wastes from 13 industries were added to the regulated substances. The number of fee-payers has increased from 1,200 to 4,800. After the revision, an average of 250 million NT dollars of remediation fee was collected each quarter. The levied scale has achieved the objectives of the original plan. The proportion of the fund came from the petrochemical industry has decreased, which make the fee sources more reasonable. Almost 2 years has passed since the revision of the collection regulation. A lot of problems have derived from the collection of remediation fee based on the production of industrial waste. However, the EPA has successfully resolved these problems in a case-by-case basis according to actual situations. With the hike of the number of fee-payers, the online filling system and database were updated for more comveniant filling and for more rapid compilation of data. The auditing process was also revised to improve administration efficiency. It is recommended that the EPA should establish a more rapid method of data exchange with the custom in order to provide the fee-payer a more convenient and accurate filling process.

Soil and groundwater, Remediation Fees