Ferro-alloys.com: China’s new Environmental Protection Tax Law is due to come into effect on 1 January 2018 and is expected to have wide-ranging ramifications for mining and mineral processing. Julian Turner reports on how this historic crackdown on pollution could impact commodities production in China, and worldwide. Death and taxes. The only two certainties in life, according to Benjamin Franklin’s famous adage, and also a consequence of, and potential solution to, China’s pollution problem.

The State of Global Air’s 2017 report claims that pollution was responsible for 1.1 million early deaths in China in 2015. According to this research, a third of all deaths in the world’s second most populous nation may be linked to smog.

As anyone who has been to Beijing and breathed in the acrid haze that periodically blankets the city will attest, tackling China’s pollution problem is a mammoth task, one that the government under President Xi Jinping has so far appeared ill-equipped to seriously address.

The nation’s historic new Environmental Protection Tax Law comes into force on 1 January 2018 and will, for the first time, levy specific environmental protection taxes on industry. The law replaces the controversial Pollutant Discharge Fee, which Beijing has been collecting from businesses since 1979, and in which regulators have long argued that businesses have been able to identify and exploit the loopholes.

“With the replacement of the existing discharge fee system with the environmental tax system, China’s regulation of environmental pollution by businesses is expected to be more efficacious,” commented Scott Daniel Silverman and Danian Zhang of multinational law firm Baker McKenzie.

 “The loopholes that have been exploited by local authorities and enterprises will disappear. Accordingly, the enterprises that directly discharge the taxable pollutants in China will be liable for the new tax payments under the law.”

• [责任编辑：yuyunqing]