The Hualien County Environmental Protection Bureau yesterday sampled wastewater from an outflow pipe at Chung Hwa Pulp Corp’s Hualien paper mill, after receiving complaints from residents that the facility discharged substandard wastewater into the Hualien River (花蓮溪), turning it into a tawny color.
Bureau officials took four samples which are to be tested for apparent color, suspended solids concentration, chemical oxygen demand and conductivity by laboratories certified by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA). The results are expected to be released in two weeks.
Aside from the turbid outflow, residents also cited a “rancid” smell, allegedly coming from the facility’s chimneys.
Chung Hwa Pulp senior specialist Yen Shih-hsiung (顏世雄) said the brownish-yellow substance that colored the river is lignin, a product dissolved from wood chips when making pulp.
He said that although wastewater from the facility is properly processed and bleached before it is discharged, it is impossible to remove lignin completely.
He denied allegations that the plant dumped substandard wastewater over the holiday period, saying that the site’s outflow is properly treated and bleached, with monitoring data to prove it.
Bureau Director-General Jao Chung (饒忠) said that residents had often complained that the firm had dumped illegal discharge during holidays or early morning to avoid scrutiny.
However, since a wastewater monitoring system was installed by the paper mill in December last year, the bureau has not found any abnormalities in the facility’s effluent, he said.
Measurements taken at the outflow pipe, updated every two hours, found the quality of the plant’s effluent to be normal over the holiday period, and results of relative accuracy test audits — which Chung Hwa Pulp administered on an EPA order, to control measurement accuracy within an acceptable margin of error — have indicated that all of the plant’s discharge conforms to EPA standards, Jao said.
He said that rivers across the nation are in their low-flow period, which might have caused wastewater discharge from the plant to look darker, as there is less water in the river to dilute it.
Under the Water Pollution Control Act (水汙染防治法), the apparent color of industrial wastewater cannot exceed 550, based on an index. The outflow from the facility ranges between 350 and 450, Jao said.
On the alleged air pollution caused by the facility, he said that the bureau has been in talks with the company over installing an emissions monitoring system inside its chimneys.
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
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
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