Although environmental groups and the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) have worked hard in recent years to clean up rivers nationwide, hundreds of illegal and unregistered pipelines still carry untreated wastewater directly from factories into rivers and the ocean.
Wei Wen-yi (魏文宜), the EPA’s director of the department of water quality protection, yesterday said that one of the reasons for this may be that fines for illegal emissions were too low when compared with the money that plants can save by not treating their wastewater.
“In 2008, we found 425 unregistered pipelines and issued citations totaling NT$42.3 million [US$1.3 million],” Wei said.
Wei said that a typical plant could emit up to 7,500 tonnes of wastewater per day. Considering that it costs about NT$25 to treat each tonne of wastewater, this means a typical factory spends about NT$150,000 each day on wastewater treatment alone.
However, the Water Pollution Protection Act (水污染防治法) stipulates that the maximum fine for installing an unregistered pipeline is NT$600,000.
“I agree, the fine is low,” Wei said.
However, change may be on the way. In February the EPA issued a record NT$130.5 million citation to an RSEA Engineering Corp water treatment plant for illegally dumping untreated wastewater into the sewage system in Taoyuan County, Wei said.
“Instead of the Water Pollution Protection Act, we cited the Administrative Penalty Act [行政罰法], which stipulates that if, by breaking a law, the gained benefit exceeds the maximum statutory amount of a fine, the fine may be increased to the extent appropriate within the scope of the benefit gained,” Wei said.
In addition, APA Article 20 stipulates that the EPA can request RSEA to return the profits, she said.
“In the future, we will seek to cite the Administrative Penalty Act to issue citations to violating factories so that they will be truly penalized,” she 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:
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