A man who loaned a piece of private land to the government for the temporary storage of polluted waste three years ago said yesterday that the government had deceived him and declared the area contaminated, forbidding its use for 15 years.
Lee Hung-yi (
Lee's land was located in Chihshanyan (赤山巖), an area in Wandan Township (萬丹), Pingtung County, where a huge volume of industrial waste was found in April 2000, allegedly left by the Formosa Plastic Group.
Mercury
Liou said that the pollutants include 7,100 tonnes of mercury-laced waste, 38,000 tonnes of hazardous waste with a high concentration of heavy metals, and 10,510 tonnes of construction waste, at one site.
The polluted materials were cleaned up and stored, requiring 373 containers, and then transferred to a different site.
"Both sites are on Lee's land," Liou said.
Liou said that the government has paid NT$90 million (US$2.77 million) to the Formosa Plastic Group to clean up the waste, but that it had cost a mere NT$50 million to do the job. This meant that the Formosa Group had earned NT$40 million in the process.
"While the government gave a large sum of money to Formosa Plastic Group, it has been loath to remove the pollutants from Lee's land," Liou said.
Lee said that he has to pay tens of thousands of dollars in tax for the land each year, but that he could not use the land.
"Three years ago, I loaned the land for the storage of the pollutants out of my goodwill, and now I have been cheated by the government," he said.
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