Ways to Reduce Water Pollution

Water pollution continues to have a negative impact within the household. This literal review is about exploring the implementation of heavy regulations, fees and taxes which will reduce the water pollution impact within Barbadian households. Various regulations that have been used to help reduce water pollution are Pollution and Product Charges. Pollution charge is a fee based on the amount of pollutants that are discharged into the environment and product charge is a fee imposed on products that are believed to have environmentally harmful effects.

Some of regulations and fees are already successfully implemented in America and China.

Within America, their Emergency Protection Agency realized there were significant opportunities to reduce or prevent pollution and these opportunities for source reduction are often not realized because the lack of regulations. The EPA created heavy regulations on water pollution with implementation of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act this is structured for regulating and control of pollutants into the water also regulating the quality standard for surface waters regulations.

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Stated by the EPA this Act reduces waste at the source by modifying production processes, promoting the use of nontoxic substances, implementing conservation techniques, and reusing materials rather than putting them into the waste stream. EPA has also developed national water quality criteria recommendations for pollutants in surface waters. The EPA made it unlawful to discharge any pollutant from a point source into waters, unless a permit was obtained. EPA's National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit program controls discharges. This NPDES program requires polluters to obtain permits, or licenses, to discharge.

These permits specify pollution amounts that can be legally discharged.

Along with America, China also have regulations but along fees and taxes on water pollution, China’s Wastewater Discharge Fees were based on treatment costs under the “Regulations on Collection, Use & Management of Wastewater Charges”. According to Professor MA Zhong’ s report (the executive director of the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences) the low discharge fees led to high wastewater pollution; furthermore, low water prices did not encourage companies to recycle water, reduce usage and reduce wastewater discharge. Statistics show China’s total `wastewater discharge has steadily risen from 41.5 billion tons in 2000 to 73.5 billion tons in 2015.

After these low fees didn’t reduce the pollution, China reformed and reinforced its pollutants regulations with respect to water. China created the new Environmental Protection Law (EPL) within the year of 2015. Despite these actions made, during the first two years of the new EPL’s implementation, there was no significant change in water pollution as many companies were still major polluters with excessive discharges.

So, China realized, they need have heavier regulations and fees, thus reforming the tax system from “Resource fees to Resource taxes”. According to the State Administration of Taxation (SAT), there are three main differences between fees and taxes: first, the main tax-collection bodies are the tax authorities, customs and fiscal authorities representing the state, while fees are collected by sector administrations. Second, tax rates are fixed, while fees are determined based on treatment costs. Third, revenues collected from fees are used for water conservation, while revenues from taxes can be used by the State for any purpose.

Both China and United States after implementing these regulations and charges has seen a major decrease of pollutants into the waters. These regulations and charges allow them to gain more control over water pollution. Barbados can adopt these regulations and charges to gain control and change the negative impact water pollution have within the household.