Environmental inspectors and prosecutors said yesterday that a Taiwan company has grossly violated statutes regarding the disposal of hazardous industrial waste.
Prosecutors said yesterday they had found 50 tonnes of scrapped PC-boards deposited inside two cargo containers by the THB Environment Corp.
The containers were mislabeled as "residue of copper compounds" and placed at transportation stations in Taipei County and Keelung County, ready for shipment outside the country.
Though THB is licensed as an A-class waste handler, it has no license to export waste.
The scrapped PC-boards were waiting for transport to a Chinese harbor by two shipping companies. The cargo containers were apparently mislabeled "residue of copper compounds" to minimize the likelihood of inspectors inquiring about the containers' contents.
Environmental officials said that THB -- while licensed to handle the waste -- had not applied for any hazardous industrial waste export permits, which are issued by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA).
Wang Yi-wen (
Wu Sheng-jong (吳盛忠), head of the EPA's North Region Branch Inspection Bureau, told the Taipei Times that yesterday's action was a follow-up to a report by environmental inspectors on July 24.
"When inspecting THB's only storage site in Tashi on July 24, we discovered that about half of the hazardous industrial waste supposedly collected at the site was missing," Wu said.
* THB Environment Corp has allegedly mislabeled hazardous waste and attempted to ship the waste abroad.
* The company's hazardous waste storage site is also missing half of the waste that its records indicate should be there -- leading prosecutors to believe it had been illegally shipped abroad or dumped somewhere in Taiwan.
Wu said that THB has since April of last year collected two kinds of hazardous industrial waste -- scrapped PC-boards and copper contaminated sludge -- produced by 81 manufacturers of electronic products.
THB says its statistics show it has collected 3,000 tonnes of copper-contaminated sludge and 2,000 tonnes of scrapped PC-boards, but it has never applied for an export permit.
"We suspected that the waste missing from the site has either been illegally shipped to other countries or secretly dumped within Taiwan," Wu said.
The EPA then reported to prosecutors THB's alleged violations of the Waste Disposal Act.
According to Wu, THB has filed documents with the government stating that it has the facilities to handle 5,000 tonnes of copper-contaminated sludge and 7,200 tonnes of scrapped PC-boards per year.
Wu said that THB had contracted with two waste handlers, US-based Envirosafe Services of Idaho and another firm in Hangzhou (
Prosecutors and environmental inspectors next week will re-examine all of THB's scrapped PC-boards and other waste stored on its site in a bid to trace the missing waste.
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