Legislators attacked the Environ-mental Protection Administration (EPA) yesterday, saying soil and groundwater have been seriously polluted by toxic fly ash from incinerators because the agency has for years failed to properly manage incinerator residue.
DPP Legislator Eugene Jao (
Incineration residue can be separated into two parts -- fly ash, most of which is captured from smokestacks by air pollution control systems, and bottom ash, which falls through the grate of an incinerator's combustion chamber into an ash pit.
Both types of ash must be removed for further treatment since they contain toxic heavy metals, such as chromium, cadmium, lead, arsenic, zinc, and others as well as organic compounds, such as PCBs, dioxins, benzene, and other cancer-inducing materials.
Jao said a recent investigation by his office found that the EPA has failed to manage such toxic ash appropriately.
The investigation report says that each year about 20,000 tonnes of fly ash from four incinerators in Taipei County was dumped at a landfill in Shulin township after being mixed with bottom ash.
According to the report, Taipei County is not the only problem area. The report says that the EPA doesn't really know where the fly ash collected from 13 out the 19 incinerators ends up.
"Where has the fly ash gone? Each year incinerators generate 98,185 tonnes of toxic fly ash to pollute the environment," Jao said.
Jao also urged the EPA to release records about the examination of water spilled from landfills, saying the public has a right to know such information.
Jao said the EPA should punish incinerator operators that mismanage fly ash and regulations pertaining to recycling toxic fly ash should be carefully revised to avoid creating more environmental pollution.
Officials of the EPA's Bureau of Incinerator Engineering, however, said yesterday that most incinerators either store fly ash temporarily at factory sites or stabilize it through advanced technologies.
EPA officials say some of the facilities needed to appropriately manage incinerator residue are still under construction.
An aide to Jao, Yang Jiao-yen (楊嬌豔), told the Taipei Times yesterday that problems related to the EPA's burn-oriented waste management have emerged since last year when anti-incinerator activists asked the legislature to freeze the agency's proposed budget for building and maintaining incinerators.
"It's pity that we haven't seen any reflection of the EPA on the policy," Yang said.
Yang said that legislators would work with anti-incinerator activists to host a waste manage-ment summit in March that would highlight problems with the EPA's policies.
In the 1990s the EPA estimated that by the end of this year it would have 36 incinerators in operation, capable of burning 30,400 tonnes of municipal solid waste per day.
Last March the agency canceled four incinerator projects.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching