Citing concern over potential pollution, more than 300 medical professionals are petitioning against Kuokuang Petrochemical Technology's plans to build an eighth naphtha cracking plant.
“Kuokuang Petrochemical Technology has refused to tell us its manufacturing procedure and what kinds of chemicals would be used in its production process,” Wu Kuen-yuh (吳焜裕), an associate professor at National Taiwan University’s College of Public Health Institute of Occupational Medicine and Industrial Hygiene, told a press conference yesterday. “How could we correctly assess its risks?”
“The process of conducting the assessment was fraught with flaws,” said Wu, who is a member of a committee the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) consults for a public health assessment before holding meetings to review the environmental impacts of proposed projects.
Taking the Kuokuang project as an example, Wu said the health risk assessment did not include the impact of a number of hazardous chemicals such as toluene and dioxins on the human body.
While the EPA in April laid out a set of guidelines for making health risk assessments, Wu said they were “sloppy” rules.
“The issue has long been ignored by the government, so no acceptable levels of pollutants from petrochemicals have been established,” he said.
The EPA’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Committee is responsible for determining if a project meets health risk criteria when the project carries more than a 0.0001% chance of causing cancer.
The criteria is based on a report on the sixth naphtha cracking plant’s fourth phase expansion project in Yunlin County’s Mailiao Township (麥寮), which assessed the impact of only one kind of benzene on human health.
“There are many other cancer causing chemicals used in petrochemical manufacturing and we don’t even know how they would affect health,” Wu said. “How could the EIA Committee have such power to determine the public’s health?”
If Kuo Kuang Petrochemical Technology’s proposed petrochemical plant on the Changhua coast materializes, it would span about 4,000 hectares. Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) said this would make it the biggest refinery in the world, superseding the sixth naphtha cracking plant, which spans more than 2000 hectares off the coast of Yunlin County.
Tien said that although the petrochemical plant project could help to create more jobs, the air pollution it would cause could pose a health threat to the entire population of Taiwan. Such pollution could cause obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular problems, myocardial infarction and arrhythmias, among other problems, she said.
Kuo Yu-cheng (郭育誠), an assistant professor of pharmacology at Taipei Medical University, said that the government should not sacrifice public health for economic development.
Chiang Tzu-te (江自得), a physician of chest medicine at the Tungs’ Taichung MetroHarbor Hospital, said the petrochemical industry is considered a major source of industrial air pollution.
As a doctor who specializes in cardiopulmonary diseases, he said, he is worried that long-term exposure to pollution could lead to asthma and an increased risk of various types of cancer.
“Taiwan’s ethylene self-sufficiency ratio has reached a level where we don’t need another refinery,” he said. “To allow the Kuokuang Petrochemical project to go ahead is to allow conglomerates to make money polluting Taiwan. As a physician, I can’t stand this.”
The petition by the medical professionals was the latest in a series of campaigns by environmental activists, university professors and Academia Sinica against the project.
Another petition was expected to be launched by people from cultural and art circles, said Shih Yueh-ying (施月英), secretary general of Changhua Coast Conservation Action.
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