A large amount of waste from along Taiwan’s eastern coast is routinely carried by ocean currents to Okinawa, a Japanese official said while visiting Taiwan.
Plastic bottles from Taiwan found along the shore of Iriomote Island — the prefecture’s second-largest island — at one point accounted for 30 percent of waste on the island, surpassing locally generated trash, said Hidefumi Toma, director-general of the Okinawa Prefectural Government’s Department of Environmental Affairs.
Toma, leading members from 11 Japanese environmental protection groups, made the comment while visiting the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology in Keelung, where he and museum director Wu Chun-jen (吳俊仁) exchanged opinions on marine pollution from litter and discussed waste management policies in Japan and Taiwan
Photo provided by the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology
In response, Wu said the bottles are carried to the island by the Kuroshiro current, also known as the “Black Stream,” which begins off the east coast of Taiwan and flows northeast past Japan.
“Litter knows no boundaries. Here’s hoping that all will work as one to protect the environment,” Wu said.
According to Toma, ocean currents often carry large quantities of garbage to mangrove forests offshore of Iriomote Island, which then become tangled in the plants causing considerable damage.
By tracing the origins of plastic bottles, the department found that China has been the largest generator of discarded plastic bottles for 10 consecutive years, while the proportion of those from Taiwan has in recent years dropped below 15 percent, Toma said.
Taiwan Environmental Information Center deputy secretary-general Sun Hsiu-ju (孫秀如) said the international community is attaching more importance to the problem of marine debris.
She said Taiwan’s shoreline is also frequently hit by garbage from foreign lands, and that the issue should be resolved through multinational collaboration.
Wu said that the museum has over the past 10 years routinely removed garbage from the intertidal zone near Chaojin Park (潮境公園).
“We put the garbage found along the coast on display at one of our exhibition halls to raise public awareness about protecting the marine environment,” he said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,