Environmental protection advocates yesterday staged a protest in front of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) building in Taipei, accusing the agency of colluding with corporations to relax restrictions on controlled chemicals that are harmful to human health.
Trees Party chief strategy officer Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲) said ahead of a public hearing about draft amendments to the Water Pollution Control Act (水汙染防治法) that the agency only invited union members from industries whose operations would be affected by the proposed amendments, while environmental groups, including the Taiwan Water Resources Protection Union, were excluded.
The agency did not announce the hearing on its Web site like it normally does, Pan added.
Although the draft proposes adding 23 chemicals to the EPA’s list of controlled chemicals, the protesters said the move would open a back door for industrial and technology companies because the amendments would narrow the scope of control over several categories of harmful chemicals, resulting in less stringent rules covering industrial wastewater management.
Under the draft amendments, fluorides would be limited to fluoride salt, organic mercury would be narrowed to methylmercury, while hydrofluoric acid is to be removed from the list.
Pan said that it took environmentalists years of campaigning before a rule was finally promulgated to regulate toxic chemicals produced by the photovoltaic industry.
He said the EPA would be overturning what the environmentalists have accomplished if the amendment is passed.
Taiwan Water Resources Protection Union director Jennifer Nien (黏麗玉) said the group had served as a watchdog monitoring the distribution and safety of the nation’s water resources for many years, but it was excluded from yesterday’s public hearing, which she described as a “black box” meeting.
EPA Department of Water Quality director Yeh Chun-hung (葉俊宏) said that the amendments were proposed so that phrasing in the list and in the EPA’s standards on wastewater control would be consistent, a move intended to avoid possible objections arising from confusing phraseology during attempts to adjudicate on breaches of the act.
The proposal also aims to clearly define the EPA’s responsibilities; for example, the agency has examined methylmercury levels in industrial wastewater because it is the most toxic type of mercury and is known to be a threat to public health from past incidents.
Yeh said other types of mercury are much less toxic and do not pose such grave a threat to people, adding that the agency’s capacity does not allow it to monitor every kind of mercury in wastewater.
He said that hydrofluoric acid is almost impossible to detect in water, because the acid breaks up into hydrogen and fluoride ions, adding that the agency is concerned about fluoride ions possibly forming pollutants by combining with other metals.
He said that changing the wording of statutes to read “fluoride salts” instead of “fluorides” would facilitate law enforcement, adding that fluoride ion concentrations in water are regulated through monitoring fluoride salts.
The agency is to announce all public hearings on its Web site from now on, Yeh added.
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
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