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Kaohsiung voters hold referendum against incinerator

Residents of the Hsiaokang District of Kaohsiung City yesterday voted against allowing a medical-waste incinerator to undergo a trial run, marking the first time an advisory referendum has been held in southern Taiwan.

The Hsiaokang vote comes in the wake of advisory referendums held in Pinglin, Taipei County, in September and in Chichi, Nantou County, in October.

Sixty-one percent of the 11,778 qualified voters from the six boroughs near the incinerator cast ballots, including many senior citizens and even a bride in her wedding gown.

The result was 97.8 percent of the 7,187 votes cast were opposed to the incinerator.

The referendum was held by a committee composed of borough chiefs, community leaders and representatives of environmental and cultural groups. They have been protesting against the project for more than two years.

"I'm very touched by residents' enthusiastic response to the referendum. We hope our opinion will no longer be ignored by the city government," Huang Juin-fu (黃俊富), Fengming borough chief, said yesterday.

According to Huang, the location of the incinerator, designed to dispose of infectious medical waste, is questionable. The distance from the incinerator to the six boroughs ranges between 300m and 900m.

"We hope holding the referendum is the beginning of a peaceful and effective way to communicate with the government," Huang said.

One voter said Hsiaokang residents had been discriminated against for decades because there had been many environmentally-unfriendly facilities established there, including steelmaking furnaces in a nearby industrial complex and a large household-waste inciner-ator with a daily capacity of 1,800 tonnes.

Most residents believe that it is not necessary for them to have another incinerator for infectious medical waste.

Tsao Chih-kuan (曹智冠), an activist from the Fengpitou Cultural Association (鳳鼻頭文化協會), told the Taipei Times that the referendum's results would be sent to the Kaohsiung City Government within days in order to persuade Mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) to close the new incinerator.

In early October, when residents demanded local authorities hold a referendum to decide the future of the facility, Hsieh rejected the request. He said the referendum lacked a legal basis.

"This is nonsense," Tsao said."They now want to add a new polluter before removing old ones, such as the steelmaking furnaces."

Tsao said that the city's Environmental Protection Bureau has never informed residents about the amount of Hsiaokang's dioxin emissions.

Tsao said that the government had to do something, because deteriorating air quality would negatively affect residents' health.

George Cheng (鄭益明), the secretary-general of the Taiwan Watch Institution, said the Environmental Protection Administration has to face public opinions delivered through the channel of an advisory referendum, even though a legal basis for such referendums to challenge policies has not established yet.

"An incinerator-oriented waste management policy is a total mistake," Cheng said.
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