Residents of Kaohsiung City's Fengming Borough might have an additional question to ponder when they cast their ballots for the presidential election and referendum on March 20.
Activists are planning to hold an advisory referendum that day to decide whether to keep expressing their opposition to a controversial medical waste incinerator that has been built next to their community.
Fengming borough chief Huang Juin-fu (黃俊富) said yesterday that holding the referendum on March 20 would be convenient and save money.
The Kaohsiung City Government had planned to issue a license to the incinerator operator last month, but the administrative process was delayed when a panel of experts evaluating the project raised questions about its safety.
question of urgency
Huang said the city government might issue the license after the presidential election, since the facility met the required standards during a five-day trial last September.
Once the license has been issued, the incinerator can go into operation, treating a maximum of eight tonnes of infectious medical waste per day.
Opponents of the incinerator are considering to conduct an advisory referendum outside the polling stations for the presidential election.
The borough's residents would be asked whether they approve of a demonstration in front of the incinerator.
In a previous advisory referendum held on Dec. 7 last year, residents of the Hsiaokang District expressed their opposition to the incinerator.
Sixty-one percent of the 11,778 qualified voters from the six boroughs near the incinerator cast ballots, and 97.8 percent of them disapproved of the waste-treatment facility.
Opponents of the incinerator say that Hsiaokang residents have been discriminated against for decades.
They claimed that a number of environmentally-unfriendly facilities have been built there over the years, including steelmaking furnaces in a nearby industrial complex and a large household-waste incinerator with a daily capacity of 1,800 tonnes.
health concerns
Research findings released by the Environmental Protection Administration last year showed that the area's residents have the highest level of dioxin in their blood of all people living near large waste incinerators.
The level in Hsiaokang is 26 percent higher than average.
Huang said yesterday that some details of the proposed advisory referendum still have to be finalized and that a final decision on whether to have the referendum on March 20 or not would be taken within days.
Only about 2,200 people living in Fengming Borough will be eligible to vote.
Legislators yesterday asked Environmental Protection Administration Administrator Chang Juu-en (張祖恩) how he proposes to deal with the nationwide opposition to incinerators.
"Incineration is only one of the ways to manage waste. We will not insist on building waste incinerators if other solutions are available," Chang said.
He said that advisory referendums on incinerators give an indication of public opinion, and that they could be regarded as a valuable point of reference.
However, he said that it would be impossible to abandon all landfills, incinerators and other waste-management facilities.
"Even if people reduce waste and recycle as much as they possibly can, facilities to process garbage would still be necessary," Chang said.
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