The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) is aiming to integrate the efforts of various government agencies in an effort to more effectively prevent vessels from polluting the ocean.
Fifteen representatives from the EPA, the port of Kaohsiung, the Ministry of Justice, the Coast Guard Administration and the Hualien County Government's environmental protection bureau visited the US at the beginning of this month seeking to benefit from their US contemporaries' experience of inspecting ships for the provision of pollution-prevention measures, which include incinerators, wastewater processing systems and oil-water separators.
Hsu Jen-tse (許仁澤), chief of the EPA's marine pollution prevention section, said the administration had found that some ships operating in the seas off Taiwan dump sewage or other types of waste directly into the ocean to save on waste processing costs. Some had even fabricated their waste disposal records.
Hsu said the US has established thorough ship-inspection procedures. Coastguards compare documents recording waste disposal activity provided by crews with data from waste disposal equipment on their vessels to see if the two correlate. The responsibilities of each government agency are clearly defined, Hsu added, so that people from different agencies know exactly what to do when they board ships.
Hsu emphasized, however, that the focus of the trip was to see how the US is able to integrate the efforts of different administrative agencies to jointly prevent ships from polluting the oceans.
He said that while the agencies in Taiwan have all managed to enforce regulations, they have not worked closely enough to react quickly to situations.
"Integration of the agencies will help expand the manpower available to prevent pollution of the ocean," he said.
Hsu noted the challenges in carrying out the task. His section has only five full-time staff, and coastguards can only inspect ships near ports or before they set sail.
"It is not easy once they are out at sea," Hsu said, adding that they had only caught one ship handling waste inappropriately last year.
Currently, ships found to have illegally dumped waste at sea can face fines ranging from NT$300,000 (US$9,375) to NT$1.5 million. Further criminal charges can be pressed against those who fabricate waste disposal records.
According to Hsu, officials from the US Environmental Protection Agency are expected to visit Taiwan in either September or October to offer further assistance in preventing sea pollution.
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:
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