Pollution charges per tonne: how the over-limit multiplier works

Updated: 2026-08-13 · ISKRIT

A pollution charge looks like a price list and behaves like a penalty. The rate per tonne is the small part; the multiplier applied to the tonnes above your permit is what decides the invoice.

The shape every scheme shares

Charge schemes for emissions to air, discharges to water and waste sent to landfill all reduce to the same expression: the mass released, times a rate per tonne set for that substance, times one or more factors. The factors carry the policy. The rate on its own carries almost nothing, because a scheme that charged one flat rate would let a plant buy its way past the permit at the price of compliance.

So the mass is split before the rate is applied. What is inside the permit is charged at the base rate. What sits in a temporary allowance, granted while an abatement plan runs, is charged at a penal rate. What exceeds everything is charged at a rate high enough that the cheapest option is to stop.

Three bands, not one number

The Russian charge is the clearest example of the pattern, because the bands are written into the statute rather than into a tariff schedule. Under article 16.3 of federal law 7-FZ the multiplier depends on which band the tonnage falls in.

A hundredfold multiplier is not a price. It is a statement that the tonnage should not exist, expressed in money so that the accounting system notices. The practical consequence is that the last tonne over a limit can cost more than the whole permitted load, which is why the split matters more than the rate lookup and why splitting it by hand goes wrong.

The same idea elsewhere

Load-based licensing in New South Wales reaches the same place by a different road: the fee is the assessable load times a pollutant weighting times a zone weighting times a fee unit, and the portion of the load above a fee rate threshold is charged at double. The threshold represents what modern technology can reasonably achieve, so the doubling is aimed at the gap between what you emit and what you could.

Per-tonne charges without an explicit band exist too. The Czech air pollution charge and the French general tax on polluting activities both set a rate per tonne by substance and lean on the permit rather than on a multiplier to handle exceedances. They also both carry a floor: below a threshold sum, nothing is due, on the grounds that collecting it costs more than it raises.

Weighting by substance, not by tonnage

Rates differ between substances by three or four orders of magnitude, and the ordering follows harm rather than volume. Carbon monoxide is charged in single-digit roubles per tonne while lead compounds run to tens of thousands. A facility that reduces its largest tonnage often barely moves the bill; one that removes a small mass of a heavily weighted substance can halve it. This is the intended behaviour, and it is invisible until the fee is calculated substance by substance rather than in total.

Where the location factor comes in

Most schemes adjust for where the release lands. New South Wales applies a critical zone weighting for sensitive receiving environments. The Russian scheme doubles the rate for a facility inside a specially protected natural area. Both encode the same fact: the same tonne does different damage in different places, and a charge indifferent to location prices it wrong.

Questions

Is a pollution charge a tax? In national accounts it is usually classified as one. Operationally it behaves as a permit-linked charge, because the amount depends on your authorisation and not only on the mass.

Can abatement spending be set against it? In some schemes, yes. Documented spending on measures included in an approved environmental programme can be deducted from the Russian charge, and Germany allows investment in effluent treatment to be offset. Most schemes do not allow it.

The three-band split, the multipliers and the rates by substance are applied automatically in the Russian environmental fee calculator, which takes the actual mass and the two limits and works out which tonnes fall where.