The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) yesterday announced the initial results of a green technology treatment for lead acid battery waste which can reportedly remove up to 80 percent of heavy metals.
The EPA’s Recycling Fund Management Board said lead acid batteries are commonly used in electric vehicles, for uninterruptible power supplies at mobile phone base stations, emergency lighting systems and in forklift trucks, adding that the demand for the batteries is increasing.
According to the administration’s estimates, about 50,000 tonnes of lead acid battery waste are created every year. By recycling 40,000 tonnes of lead and about 3,000 tonnes of plastic, an output worth about NT$1.42 billion (US$49 million) could generated annually.
The board’s executive secretary, Ma Nien-ho (馬念和), said that battery acid waste used to be mixed and neutralized with wastewater from washing plastic debris, and then discharged into industrial wastewater treatment plants, the neutralization process created more chemically precipitated sludge and the acid went to waste.
After evaluating more environmentally friendly ways to treat battery waste, research institutes suggested adding diffusion dialysis equipment to the treatment process before neutralizing the waste.
By using an anion exchange membrane, more than 80 percent of heavy metal substances can be removed from the waste, the EPA said, adding that this method can also help recycle about 80 percent of the sulfuric acid, as well as reduce the chemically precipitated sludge by 50 percent.
Using a medium-sized treatment plant as an example, Ma said, about 300 tonnes of battery waste treated each month would create about 70 tonnes of acid waste water, and about NT$114,000 can be saved from reduced purchase of chemical substances for water neutralization and precipitated sludge treatment, if the new treatment equipment is installed — which would be beneficial both financially and environmentally.
The EPA also reminded people to be careful when disposing of lead-acid batteries.
They should hand them in at recycling facilities and also pay attention not to let the erosive acid liquid spill out, it said.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: