A plastic bottle used for motor oil produced by CPC Corp, Taiwan, (CPC) was among the garbage collected by US Greenpeace campaigners in the North Pacific Ocean, and might have been adrift there for more than a decade, Greenpeace Taiwan said yesterday.
The bottle bears the company’s previous Chinese-language mark, “Chinese Petroleum Corp,” before it changed its name in 2007, a testament to its having been drifting in the ocean for at least 11 years, Greenpeace Taiwan said.
The bottle was discovered by a group of US Greenpeace members whose ocean cleanup in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ended earlier this month, it said.
Located halfway between California and Hawaii, the patch covers 1.6 million square kilometers and consists of 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic garbage, according to a study published by scientists affiliated with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation in the March issue of Scientific Reports.
During the cleanup, Greenpeace members found plastic bottles produced by beverage makers such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Wahaha and Kang Shi Fu as well as chemical developers Bayer, Cloralex and Kao Bleach, it said.
Microplastics — small plastic pieces less than 5mm in diameter — can absorb toxic chemicals and heavy metal substances, and might affect the health of animals when they ingest the particles along with food, it said.
The amount of plastic debris that it found in the patch was 11 times more than its previous samplings off the coast of US major cities such as Los Angles, San Francisco, San Diego, New York and Miami, US Greenpeace said in a news release on Oct. 17.
“Coca-Cola was the worst corporate plastic polluter, found in 40 of 42 countries overall. Greenpeace found a Coca-Cola bottle from China, produced more than 1,000 miles [1,609km] from where it was found in the garbage patch,” it 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