Article 1232 of the Civil Code introduces a punitive damages system in the field of environmental infringement, which reflects the appropriate responsibility of the civil law for ecological and environmental public welfare protection. It is also a legal response to the concept of building a beautiful China proposed by the 19th National Congress. The punitive damages system originated in the Anglo-American legal system, aiming to punish and contain serious infringement behavior. The introduction of this system in the field of environmental infringement can stimulate the enthusiasm of the infringed party in environmental pollution and ecological damage cases through appropriate interest tilting, form a deterrent to ecological and environmental harm behavior, and become a supplement to the public law regulation of environmental harm behavior, indicating that China has constructed a stricter ecological environment protection system at the legislative level. However, it should be noted that, considering the actual effect of China's previous punitive damages system and its inherent attributes, the establishment of this system in the field of environmental infringement may also lead to potential negative effects such as increased risk of excessive litigation, excessive deterrence of production activities, and overlapping responsibilities of homogeneous systems. Therefore, it is necessary to interpret the text of the legal provisions, clarify the normative elements of punitive damages liability for environmental infringement, narrow the understanding of "law" in this provision, clarify the constituent elements of liability and the specific meaning of "the infringee". At the same time, to prevent the negative effects of the punitive damages system for environmental infringement, appropriate regulations should be made on the judicial application of this law. The specific path includes three aspects:adopting a legislative model of "fixed amount+flexible amount" for the amount of punitive damages in relevant implementation rules, and combining with typical cases of judicial application of punitive damages in existing fields, striving to unify the standards for measuring interests in each case; Integrate seemingly independent but homogeneous responsibilities set up for the same behavior, to avoid the overlapping application of this system with administrative fines and criminal fines, resulting in excessive legal responsibility for environmental hazards and violating the order principle of "punishment should be equivalent to responsibility"; In terms of the time scope for the application of punitive damages liability, judicial authorities should pay attention to combining relevant judicial interpretations and referring to the principles of "favorable traceability" of public law liability, following the concept of "legal rules take precedence over legal principles", and accurately determine the time scope for the application of the liability.