Residents of Kaohsiung’s Luzhu (路竹) and Hunei (湖內) districts yesterday filed a lawsuit with the Kaohsiung High Administrative Court to revoke environmental approval for iron wire and screw factories to be built by Chen Nan Iron Wire Co (震南鐵線公司), citing environmental concerns and procedural flaws in the review process.
Lee Yao-ching (李耀慶) and Hsu Tung-yuan (許東源) filed the lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), saying that the exclusion of local residents during the environmental review of the project invalidates the results, as residents did not know of the project until earlier this year.
The Kaohsiung City Government passed the environmental review of the Chen Nan plants in May last year.
Lee and Hsu filed a petition with the EPA to revoke the project in April, but the EPA rejected the petition in August, saying that Lee and Hsu did not reside within 5km of the proposed site, nor could they prove that the development would have a negative impact on them and, therefore, they should not be considered as interested parties.
Lee said that the Erren River (二仁溪), where sewage from the proposed factories would be discharged, is a water source for all the fish farms in Hunei, which was an environmental impact that the EPA had not taken into consideration.
The proposed factory site in Hunei is owned by state-run Taiwan Sugar Corp, which was given approval to lease the property to private businesses for industrial development in 2006.
Approval for Chen Nan to open an iron wire and screw factory in the area sparked a series of protests, as residents said that the factory’s manufacturing processes involve pickling metals in acid to remove impurities and oxides, and that wastewater could significantly affect farmland and the aquaculture industry downstream of the Erren River.
Hsu said that residents have been ignored, and were denied access to a pre-construction public hearing in August, which was heavily policed.
Lee and Hsu said that they filed the lawsuit to seek judicial remedy.
Environmental Jurists Association lawyer Kuo Hung-yi (郭鴻儀) said that the environmental review of the project reversed the cause and effect by approving the project under the assumption that the development would not have a significant environmental impact if the company could meet certain obligations specified by the review committee in the future, rather than referring the project to a second round of reviews to ascertain whether the company could meet those obligations.
The company has not revealed the design of its discharge pipes or detailed its wastewater treatment plan, which could increase contamination risks to local farmland and the underground water supply, the association said.
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:
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