The Taiwan Healthy Air Action Alliance yesterday released data indicating that air pollution in Hualien County was just poor enough for the county to qualify as a top-grade air pollution control zone and Taitung County is the only region that has air pollution levels that meet recommended limits.
The alliance said the average 24-hour reading of PM2.5 — fine particulate matter measuring 25 micrometers or less in diameter — in Hualien over the past three years was 35 micrograms per cubic meter according to the Environmental Protection Administration’s latest data, which qualified the county as a class-three air pollution control zone — indicating the most severe level of pollution according to the administration’s three-class system.
According to air quality stipulations in the Air Pollution Control Act (空氣污染防制法), the air quality of an area cannot be recognized as meeting safe standards unless it has a three-year average 24-hour PM2.5 value less than 35 micrograms per cubic meter, with Hualien’s three-year average just enough to for a class-three control zone designation.
Under the administration’s system, national parks and nature reserves are class-one air pollution control zones; class-two zones are places where air quality meets national standards; and areas where the air quality falls below standards for three years in a row are class-three zones.
The standards include indices of PM2.5, PM10, ozone, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. Monitoring of PM2.5 levels began in 1997, but they were only included as an air quality index in 2012.
According to another set of data previously released that measured annual PM2.5 levels through an automated device, Hualien and Taitung were the only areas that did not have substandard air quality, but the data the alliance published yesterday were gathered through manually operated devices, the alliance said.
The administration had not finished compiling the data until Monday, the alliance said.
“Taitung is the only place left in the nation with clean air. There are too many things to be done to restore Taiwan’s air quality, and the new government must address the matter and step up pollution control efforts,” alliance convener Yeh Guang-peng (葉光芃) said.
The administration said polluting facilities in class-three pollution control zones are required to limit their emissions, adding that it is mulling establishing regulations to allow individual cities and counties to cap emissions or concentrations within their boundaries.
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