Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥) plans to spend at least NT$600 million (US$19.1 million) on constructing waste gasifiers at its Ho-Ping Cement Plant in Hualien County to help deal with local garbage, aiming to turn its industrial site into a public ecological park, corporate officials said yesterday.
“Our cement kilns at the Ho-Ping site can burn waste at 1,300 degrees Celsius, higher than most incinerators. Lethal materials, such as dioxin, will break into particles and no longer harm the environment after the burning process,” company chairman Chang An-ping (張安平) told a shareholders’ meeting in Taipei.
“We do not have a time frame for the waste treatment plan, as we still want to gain approval from local communities,” he said.
The company plans to treat the waste in an enclosed space and develop a special route for garbage trucks to avoid smells and contamination, the official said.
The company aims to develop the Ho-Ping unit, near the first exit of the Suhua Highway (蘇花公路), as an ecological park after the completion of improvement projects to the freeway by the Lunar New Year holiday next year, Chang said.
The park would help the public understand the company’s carbon capture and storage technology as well as the cement-making process, he said.
The Hualien City Government in March opened a public tender for garbage treatment and last month announced that it had chosen Taiwan Cement.
“The bidding process and public hearings were conducted under the rule of law, and we plan to continue communicating with locals instead of forcing them to accept,” a Hualien City Environmental Protection Bureau official yesterday told the Taipei Times by telephone.
It would take between two and three years for the company to establish the treatment facilities and receive operating permits, said the official, who declined to be named.
The city uses several landfills to dispose of its garbage and it is estimated that about 14,800 tonnes are still sitting in open spaces, as the landfills are almost full, the official said.
The city is considering using the incinerator at Lize Industrial Park (利澤工業區) in Yilan County to dispose of its garbage, the bureau said.
Taiwan Cement held its first public hearing about its garbage treatment plan on Thursday last week, and was met with protests about environmental concerns such as air pollution and garbage contamination, the Liberty Times (the sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) reported.
The company defended its plans, saying that last month it started to use cement kilns at its Guigang unit in China’s Guangxi Province to burn 330,000 tonnes of solid waste.
As for its core business, Taiwan and southern China experienced more rainy days last month compared with a year earlier, which slowed down construction schedules and led to lower demand for cement, the company said.
Revenue last month dropped 5.51 percent year-on-year to NT$10.9 billion, but combined revenue for the first five months of the year edged up 0.24 percent to NT$46.86 billion.
Shareholders yesterday approved the company’s distribution of a cash dividend of NT$3.3, representing a payout ratio of 75.51 percent based on last year’s earnings per share of NT$4.37.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, booked its first-ever profit from its Arizona subsidiary in the first half of this year, four years after operations began, a company financial statement showed. Wholly owned by TSMC, the Arizona unit contributed NT$4.52 billion (US$150.1 million) in net profit, compared with a loss of NT$4.34 billion a year earlier, the statement showed. The company attributed the turnaround to strong market demand and high factory utilization. The Arizona unit counts Apple Inc, Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc among its major customers. The firm’s first fab in Arizona began high-volume production
VOTE OF CONFIDENCE: The Japanese company is adding Intel to an investment portfolio that includes artificial intelligence linchpins Nvidia Corp and TSMC Softbank Group Corp agreed to buy US$2 billion of Intel Corp stock, a surprise deal to shore up a struggling US name while boosting its own chip ambitions. The Japanese company, which is adding Intel to an investment portfolio that includes artificial intelligence (AI) linchpins Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), is to pay US$23 a share — a small discount to Intel’s last close. Shares of the US chipmaker, which would issue new stock to Softbank, surged more than 5 percent in after-hours trading. Softbank’s stock fell as much as 5.4 percent on Tuesday in Tokyo, its
COLLABORATION: Softbank would supply manufacturing gear to the factory, and a joint venture would make AI data center equipment, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) would operate a US factory owned by Softbank Group Corp, setting up what is in the running to be the first manufacturing site in the Japanese company’s US$500 billion Stargate venture with OpenAI and Oracle Corp. Softbank is acquiring Hon Hai’s electric-vehicle plant in Ohio, but the Taiwanese company would continue to run the complex after turning it into an artificial intelligence (AI) server production plant, Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) said yesterday. Softbank would supply manufacturing gear to the factory, and a joint venture between the two companies would make AI data
DOLLAR SIGNS: The central bank rejected claims that the NT dollar had appreciated 10 percentage points more than the yen or the won against the greenback The New Taiwan dollar yesterday fell for a sixth day to its weakest level in three months, driven by equity-related outflows and reactions to an economics official’s exchange rate remarks. The NT dollar slid NT$0.197, or 0.65 percent, to close at NT$30.505 per US dollar, central bank data showed. The local currency has depreciated 1.97 percent so far this month, ranking as the weakest performer among Asian currencies. Dealers attributed the retreat to foreign investors wiring capital gains and dividends abroad after taking profit in local shares. They also pointed to reports that Washington might consider taking equity stakes in chipmakers, including Taiwan Semiconductor
RSS