China Environmental Law

China’s Circular Economy Law is up for its third and final reading this week before the fourth session of the 11th Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.  According to Xinhua it will likely “be approved at the session which is due to end on Friday.” 

The Xinhua description of what is in the law is not very helpful

[The law] stipulates that governments at all levels should make plans to develop recycling, establish systems to control energy use and pollutant emission, strengthen management on companies with high energy and water consumption, and divert capital into environmentally friendly industries.

The draft recycling law also introduces rewards and penalties for companies, encouraging them to develop recycling by making them responsible for the recycling of their products.

It is more descriptive in reporting on what is not in the law:

China’s draft recycling law has abandoned a system to charge households varying prices for water, electricity and gas according to how much they use, because of impracticality.

The progressive price-markup system has been a controversial issue.

It was in the first draft but was deleted when the draft law went through the second reading in June.

After the second reading, some law makers insisted that the system should be included in the law, but it was eventually abandoned because investigations showed that it was too difficult to assess the level of water and power consumption in each household.

The system would also require the central government to install different meters in each home, which would consume a great deal of both money and time, the NPC’s Law Committee said in a report.

The central government issued a circular in 2002, urging all cities to implement a step-pricing system on household water use by the end of 2005.

However, only around 80 out of 661 cities are using the pricing method, figures from the National Development and Reform Commission showed.

At present, no city implements the step-pricing method on gas, and only the three provinces of Yunnan, Zhejiang and Sichuan use the pricing method on electricity.

This appears to be the change we reported on here.  Although rather than referring to a move to market pricing, the deleted provision was apparently referring to the imposition of a progressive pricing system, charging more for utilities as the amount of consumption increases.  Except for that change, and a few others noted in the previous post, I expect the law to look very similar to the draft we saw last summer.  Ready to go circular?