The Taiwan Salt Industrial Corp (TSIC, 臺鹽) will close the company's last salt field in the coastal township of Chiku in Tainan County next month, ending its solar salt manufacturing business, a company executive said yesterday.
Due to the high production costs of solar evaporation of sea water, the TSIC has closed the salt works along the coast from
Changhwa to Kaohsiung one by one in the past years. While the lion's share of domestic consumption relies on imports from Australia nowadays, the TSIC has also introduced sophisticated ion exchange techniques to recover salt directly from sea water for the production of refined salt.
The state-owned enterprise had its heyday of salt production in the 1970s and 1980s, with annual production reaching 300,000 tonnes.
The executive said the company will be privatized in the next few months and the land of old salt fields will be returned to the government.
In recent years, the company has sought to diversify its operations by investing in biotechnology. The cooperation project with BioCore Medical Technologies of the US has been quite successful, with the development, manufacture and marketing of collagen-related wound-dressing products, he said.
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