Water conservationists yesterday protested over a proposed amendment to the Water Pollution Control Act (水污染防治法), which would allow treated household wastewater to be added into groundwater systems.
At a public hearing of an amendment to the act, activists said the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) should prohibit all wastewater from entering groundwater systems and help recycle and process effluent to be reused by industries.
According to the act, treated industrial wastewater can be added to groundwater to replenish groundwater systems if it does not contain pollutants or toxins, but other types of wastewater — mainly household effluent — are not subject to the same regulations. The EPA wants to revise the act to include all types of effluent.
“Areas like Changhua and Yunlin counties rely on groundwater as their drinking water source, so we are against the idea of pumping treated wastewater underground, even if the draft amendment is stricter than the existing regulations. The government should not try to solve ground subsidence by polluting groundwater bodies, which is throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” Changhua County Environmental Protection Union secretary-general Huang Chiu-feng (黃秋鳳) said.
While groundwater has been used in agriculture, fish farming and animal husbandry in Changhua, many groundwater bodies in the county have been polluted — possibly by factories that allegedly pump wastewater underground — and the EPA’s measures would only lead to pollution and food safety issues, Changhua-based activist Shih Yueh-ying (施月英) said.
Taiwan Water Resources Protection Union director Jennifer Nien (粘麗玉) said the Reclaimed Water Resources Development Act (再生水資源發展條例) was passed last year to develop recycled water, and that effluent could be a reliable alternative source of water for industrial development, instead of being used to recharge groundwater.
“There is no need to inject treated wastewater into groundwater, and laws should be made to order all wastewater be recycled and treated for reuse by industries,” Nien said.
The EPA said it did not relax regulations, but instead set to increase the maximum penalty for injecting contaminated fluid into groundwater to a five-year prison term and NT$15 million (US$451,467) fine, as well as prohibiting 189 toxins, pollutants and carcinogens in water that can be inserted into groundwater.
“Because the treatment standard for water to be injected into groundwater is extremely stringent, which is equal to drinking water standards, there has been no company applying to inject wastewater underground ever. However, the draft amendment has been proposed to more heavily punish potential violations,” the EPA 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:
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