When 4,600 tonnes of mercury-tainted waste was to be shipped to Jenwu in June 2000, angry residents blocked roads to express their opposition against treating toxic waste near their homes.
Formosa Plastics' attitude has changed with time. Officials said the company expressed its wish to carry out the first ever related R&D in Taiwan in the near ?future to turn the estimated 2,400 tonnes of residue into tiles for use at its other factories.
The plan was actually inspired by the EPA, which, at a meeting held last September, encouraged the company to reuse the residue.
Environmentalists, however, said that the EPA should not have regarded the Formosa Plastics case as unique and have given the wrongdoer a way out.
"Rather, the EPA should seize the chance to establish a standard operating procedure for managing hazardous industrial waste," Green Formosa Foundation chairman Wu Tung-Jye (吳東傑) said.
"If Formosa Plastics is allowed to do that, does it mean that residue collected from incinerators where industrial waste was burnt would also be turned into materials which could be used anywhere on the island?" Wu asked.
Wu argued that the potential danger posed by residue left after the treatment of hazardous waste should not be ignored.
The lack of final depositories for industrial waste has troubled the EPA for years and offered a reason for the existence of more than 170 illegal dumping sites in Taiwan.
In addition, environmentalists criticized the EPA's changing definition of hazardous industrial waste, saying it would make treating waste more difficult.
According to Leu Horng-guang (呂鴻光), director-general of the EPA's Bureau of Solid Waste Management, chemical solvents generated in industrial complexes could now be burnt in incinerators because they are no longer regarded as hazardous. Lu said the EPA can now track 80 percent of the 1.5 million tonnes of hazardous industrial waste generated annually in Taiwan.
But environmentalists contest that claim.
"Think about the heavily polluted sludge in rivers, how can the EPA be so certain that the situation is under control?" Wu said, adding that pollution generated by illegal factories could be an even bigger and invisible problem.
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