The Environmental Management Agency has denied claims circulating on social media that every Zimbabwean should pay a tax for operating any generator above 5kVA.
Setting the record straight, the EMA said this applied to those using the generators at commercial and industrial levels and not those for domestic purposes.
In any case, even then the commercial licence was needed for generators or appliances using more than 5kg of fuel an hour, the input, and not the output.
EMA’s environment education and publicity manager Ms Amkela Sidange said Section 64 of the Environmental Management Act clearly stipulated that “no owner or operator of a trade or any establishment shall emit a substance or energy which causes or is likely to cause air pollution without an emission licence”, thus clearly indicating that this is a requirement for commercial or industrial use.
Statutory Instrument 72 of 2009, the Environmental Management [Atmospheric Pollution Control] Regulations of 2009 defined appliances as stationary fuel burning appliances consuming more than 5kg of fuel or other combustible matter per hour, whether this was solid, liquid or gas.
“In this case a generator becomes the appliance and if it is consuming more than 5kg of fuel per hour and being used for commercial purposes then it must be licensed by the agency and the law clarifies that the appliance in this case generators are defined on fuel consumption basis and not on the power basis that the public have been made to understand,” she said.
EMA urged members of the public to look at the benefits of the legislation which seeks to prevent air pollution and ensure members of the public enjoy access to clean environment which is not harmful to health as enshrined in the Constitution of Zimbabwe and the Environmental Management Act.
“Prevention of air pollution dovetails towards the fight against climate change where as a country we want to achieve our nationally determined contributions of 40 percent per capita emissions reduction across all sectors of the economy below the projected business as usual scenario by 2030,” she said. – The Herald
