현대오일뱅크 폐수 재활용 사건의 환경법적 쟁점

The environmental legal issue in the Hyundai Oilbank wastewater recycling case is, first, whether Hyundai Oilbank's discharging wastewater constitutes a discharge act prohibited by the Water Environment Conservation Act. According to the Korean court judgment and interpretation of the Act, the Water Environment Conservation Act prohibits the act of discharging water pollutants from discharge facilities without flowing into water pollution prevention facilities, and does not consider only the act of discharging water pollutants that necessarily flows into public waters as discharge. In addition, it does not mean that the result of environmental pollution due to discharge must be met. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Environment announced the amendment to the Enforcement Rules of the Water Environment Conservation Act, which includes provisions allowing factory wastewater to be sent to nearby factories for recycling. However, the amendment violates the the prohibition of mandatory legislation and it contains problems such as: how to calculate the wastewater discharge standards and discharge allowance standards for each business that exchanges wastewater, or how to identify responsibility if problems such as leakage of water pollutants occur during the process of exchanging wastewater. And although the prosecution said that the specific phenol content of the evaporated wastewater was unspecified because there was no measured value at the time of discharge, Hyundai Oilbank violated the Clean Air Conservation Act for the following reasons: Even though Hyundai Oilbank received permission to input and use water that does not contain phenols in the gas cleaning facility, it operated the prevention facility contrary to the permission and also by evaporating phenol in a facility without a phenol reduction function, specified hazardous air pollutant were emitted without obtaining a permit to install a discharge facility. Lastly, although it is not violation of Hyndai Oilbank, the system needs to be improved so that the authorities can manage and supervise not only when a company uses phenols directly but also when those do “occurrence in the process”.