Abstract
Environmental pollution has been continuously threatening the world. In the combat with environmental pollution problems, waste management authorities, in compliance with the “User Pays Principle-USP”, apply the “Polluter Pays Principle-3Ps” to the waste generators. Thus the resource users and the waste generators will be paying a fee for the resources and services they are using. They can be summarized as water fee, wastewater discharge fee, effluent permit fee, air emission fees, solid waste disposal fee, landfill tax, and hazardous waste tax and product charge, Advance Disposal Fee (ADF), Ozone-Depleting Chemicals (ODC), government product charge and road user fees. The main purpose of charging a fee is to encourage the users and the polluters to reduce the amount of pollutants they are generating and disposing into the environment. These fees can also be named as “a pollution charge fee”, “user charge fee” or “product charge fee”. This chapter outlines the many existing waste fee models.
TopEnvironmental Fees-Taxes
In the following sections various environmental fees and fee models will be discussed. After the discussion of some of the environmental fees such as water fees, wastewater discharge fees, air emission fees, permit fees, air toxics and ozone-depleting chemicals emission fees, solid waste disposal fees and landfill fees, criteria in the design of the solid waste disposal fees and the different fee models will be explained in detail.
Water Fees
Water fees are classified as user fees for groundwater, surface water or drinking water supplied by waterworks and as fees for direct or indirect water discharges. The idea behind the water user fees is that water is not a free unlimited resource but rather a scarce commodity that should be priced to avoid inefficient use and environmental pollution. The water fees are designed to raise budget to recover costs of providing service rather than the allocation of the scarce resource among competing needs (Bruvoll, 1998; Smith, et al., 2011).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Government Charges: Charges imposed by governments on some products such as beverage containers, refrigerators, furniture, tires, fertilizers, motor oil, pesticides and solvents.
Air Emission Fee: Fees imposed for the air emission permit.
Environmental Tax: Revenue rising instruments which are designed to fund environmental protection activities.
Ozone-Depleting Chemicals: Chemicals damaging the ozone layer.
Solid Waste Management Fee: Fee charged for the collection, disposal of municipal solid wastes.
User Charge: Fee paid in exchange for the use of natural resources or for the collection and/ or disposal of pollutants.
Pollution Charge Fee: Fee based on the quantity of pollutants that are discharged into the environment.
Product Charge: Fee imposed on products that are believed to have harmful effects on environment.