Electric arc furnaces (EAF) are frequently used in the scrap metal industry. When improperly treated, the dust they produce causes heavy metal contamination in soil and underground water, and can release dioxins into the air.
To ensure companies follow EAF dust regulations, the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) southern inspection squad last year formed a special team and discovered 40 cases in which businesses failed to follow EAF dust regulations.
“EAF dust is what is left over when scrap metal is heated to extremely high temperatures [up to 1,800ºC] to reclaim the metal that is needed,” southern inspection squad director Lee Chien-te (李建德) said.
“For example, say you are trying to extract steel from scrap metal, but your scrap also contains bits of zinc, lead, mercury or plastic — the chloride [from plastic], mercury, zinc and lead vaporizes and once the steel has been taken away, the oxidized zinc, lead and dioxins [resulting from the burning plastic] are oxidized and cooled in the extractive air flow and mixed into a resulting dust,” Lee said.
The dust is collected by environmental protection facilities in the factories for further processing, Lee said.
While aluminum EAF dust is generally benign and can be processed in regular landfills, steel and iron dust is mostly toxic and needs to go through a more complex treatment process — such as solidifying the dust into blocks and placing them in landfills designated for harmful substances, he said.
However, not every factory that produces toxic dust complies with the regulations, as the process costs more than processing regular waste, Lee said.
“We targeted factories that make secondary metals and found 40 cases where the dust was not treated properly. While some of it was aluminum dust, some was steel or iron,” Lee said.
While no cases were found where businesses directly deposited the dust into the soil, Lee said some businesses left toxic substances exposed.
He said with time, oxidized heavy metals would ooze out and find their way into the soil and underground water.
“This year, we will continue to tackle illegal treatment of EAF dust and we hope that all businesses will shoulder their responsibility to the environment and honestly report on their EAF dust. Those who fail to do so will face heavy fines,” Lee said.
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