Environmental issues are always concerned by the authorities and people. The increasing development of factories, manufacturing enterprises, discharges a lot of waste into the environment, causing serious impacts on the environment. From the above issues, the authorities are required to strengthen the control and minimize the harmful effects on the environment and people’s lives. One of the many measures applied is to pay environmental protection fees from organizations, individuals and households themselves when discharging wastewater into the environment. However, in certain cases organizations and individuals are still free of environmental protection.
On May 5, 2020 the Government issued Decree No. 53/2020/ND-CP stipulating environmental protection fee for wastewater taking effect from July 1, 2020. Accordingly, this Decree provides for cases of free environmental protection for wastewater. As follows:
Free domestic wastewater in 3 cases:
Domestic wastewater of organizations, households and individuals in communes;
Daily-life waste water of organizations, households and individuals in wards and townships without clean water supply systems;
Daily-life waste water of households and individuals not doing business in wards and townships already having clean water supply systems and using water by themselves.
In addition, this Decree stipulates a number of other cases that are free of charge:
Water discharged from hydroelectric plants;
Seawater used to produce salt is discharged;
Cooling water (in accordance with the law on environmental protection) is not directly in contact with pollutants and has its own outlet;
Waste water from rainwater naturally overflows;
Waste water from fishing means of fishermen;
Wastewater of centralized waste water treatment systems in urban areas is treated up to environmental standards and technical regulations as prescribed before being discharged into receiving sources.