Environmental groups yesterday told a meeting at the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) that the findings of a report on a health-risk evaluation conducted near Formosa Plastics Corp’s naphtha cracker in Yunlin County’s Mailiao Township (麥寮) underestimated the health risks posed to people living in the area.
An environmental impact assessment (EIA) meeting had earlier asked Formosa Plastics to produce a report on health risks related to alleged hazardous air pollutants produced by the cracker and explain its water usage at the administration yesterday, as the company plans to expand the plant.
The company’s report said that about 169 chemical substances are used in the manufacturing process at the cracker, of which only 18 are carcinogenic, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
It added that the company has always made an effort to reduce water usage at the cracker and in the past few years has limited water use to the amount approved by the EIA. No irrigation water meant for farmers was used, it said.
Taiwan Water Conservation Alliance spokesperson Chen Jiau-hua (陳椒華) said that according to the regulations on health-risk evaluations, all hazardous chemical substances must be included in evaluations.
However, the company listed only a little more than a dozen types of carcinogenic substances in its report, which likely underestimates the real degree of harm to residents living in the surrounding areas, he added.
Yeh Guang-peng (葉光芃), a doctor and a representative of the Changhua Medical Alliance for Public Affairs, said that too few types of hazardous air pollutants were evaluated in the report and that heavy metals had also been excluded from the report.
Yeh also mentioned a epidemiological survey published earlier this year and conducted by a research team led by National Taiwan University professor Chan Chang-chuan (詹長權), that seemed to imply a connection between air pollutants produced at the cracker with deficient lung, liver and kidney functions in people living within a 10km radius of the petrochemical plant. He asked why the results of the epidemiological survey differed from the results in the company’s report.
Taiwan Academy of Ecology consultant Chang Feng-nian (張豐年) said Yunlin and Changhua counties have always faced water shortage and land subsidence problems, and the Jiji Weir that provides water for the naphtha cracker has a serious reservoir sedimentation problem. The government should therefore reconsider the whole area’s water usage plans, rather than only look at the cracker’s water usage, Cheng said.
Some of the committee members at the meeting agreed that not enough types of hazardous chemical substances had been listed for evaluation and that the company should clarify whether the air pollutants have a causal relationship with the increasing rate of lung cancer in Mailiao in the past few years.
The convener of the meeting suggested that the company refer to suggestions made by the civic groups and committee members in preparing its report for the next EIA review meeting.
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
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
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