Environmental pollution fines too meager

Fines for companies that disobey environmental protection laws are too meager to be effective, a senior official said on Monday, a month after a local firm was fined only a fraction of the damages it caused to a river it used as a dumping ground for waste oil.

"Companies are conscientiously discharging pollutants on land and in water," Zhang Quan, director of the city's environmental protection authority, said during a local radio program. "Chinese law states that those responsible for such crimes should be severely punished, but in reality, the cost of breaking the law is quite low."

As such, the legalities are failing to prevent companies from polluting, he said.

The comments came yesterday, after Shanghai Tengfei Trade Company was found guilty last month of dumping oil waste into Qingpu district's Dianpu River, which caused major environmental pollution problems and cost authorities some 380,000 yuan ($60,420) to clean up.

Despite the company's general manager receiving a year in jail and a 100,000 yaun-fine for his responsibility in the crime, the company was excused from penalties. District prosecutors, however, are urging local industry and commerce authorities to sue the company 50,000 yuan over the incident - still a small sum in comparison to the damages.

But, most companies rather risk a fine than comply with environmental protection laws that require them to invest in costly facilities and procedures, said Li Renzheng, a lawyer from Yingke Law Firm, who has managed corporate cases concerning environmental protection issues.

"Moreover, companies are often generous tax payers, and as such, district government officials tend to protect them by turning a blind eye to their illegal waste-dumping," he told the Global Times yesterday.

In 2005, the city proposed to raise the maximum fine for disobeying companies from 200,000 to 500,000 yuan, but that effort was soon stalled.

Yet, simply upping the fine is not the right approach, according to Dai Xingyi, a professor of environmental economics at Fudan University. He said that placing an onus on companies to prove their innocence in suspected cases of malpractice would be better.

"Companies are profit-driven," he told the Global Times yesterday. "If the law makes breaking the rules unaffordable, then more of them will focus on finding cost-effective ways to follow them."