Representatives from environmental groups yesterday called for stricter regulatory standards on industrial wastewater discharge, ahead of the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) public hearings on the proposed standards.
Current regulations on industrial wastewater are too loose, Citizen of the Earth Foundation member Lu Yi-chi (呂翊齊) said during the protest in front of the EPA’s headquarters.
Lu said Taiwan’s petrochemical industry dates back more than 40 years, but the first draft of regulatory standards exclusively for petrochemical wastewater discharge, announced in June, still left out many aspects that should have been included.
The proposed standards for petrochemical industry wastewater would set limits on the density of six types of volatile organic compounds and six types of semi-volatile organic compounds (including plasticizers), as well as their nitrogenous substances and other aspects such as temperature and acidity.
Lu said that while US industrial wastewater discharge regulations list 110 types of toxic chemical -substances, Japan and EU countries have even stricter standards regulating how much toxic organic compounds are allowed in rivers.
“How can the government believe that establishing standards for 12 types of compounds is enough to protect public health?” he asked.
Dajyue River Culture Association member and volunteer river patrol Pan Chung-cheng (潘忠政) said rivers were supposed to be clean and safe, but even with volunteer river patrols monitoring the waters, the rivers are still often polluted by industrial wastewater.
“If there aren’t stricter regulations and inspections, then years of river patrolling will be useless,” he said.
Taiwan Academy of Ecology secretary-general Tsai Chih-hao (蔡志豪) said several industry wastewater discharge canals are connected to agricultural irrigation ditches, and if the standards are not strict enough, pollutants would be absorbed by crops and could affect human health.
Citizen of the Earth Foundation founder Lee Ken-cheng (李根政) called for additional regulatory standards on “total toxic organic compounds” to prevent the accumulation of other types of pollution.
Standards on acute toxicity in aquatic organisms have been included in the regulation standards for the photonics industry last year and should be added to regulate petrochemical, wafer and silicon industries as well, Lu said.
More than 50 civic groups and four legislators signed a petition supporting the demands for stricter standards.
During the public hearing, representatives of petrochemical industries said they hoped for either more time to modify their processes to adapt to the standards, or looser standards so they could attain them in time to meet the EPA’s schedule.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Sue-ying (黃淑英) asked the agency to explain its criteria for setting the schedule and standards, and whether those were meant to benefit public health or how much the industry was willing to cope with the problem.
EPA Department of Water Quality Protection section chief Chu Wen-ti (儲雯娣) said the agency had used the standards from other countries as a reference when drafting those for Taiwan, which he described as falling in the middle range between too strict and too loose.
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