Two controversial illegal waste dumping cases in southern and central Taiwan ended temporarily yesterday when prosecutors indicted waste handlers, officials and industrial firms involved, proposing millions of dollars in fines and lengthy prison terms.
In Kaohsiung County, four officials involved in the operation of a waste incinerator in Meinung township (
The accused include former and current Meinung township wardens Chung Hsin-tsai (鍾新財) and Chung Shao-huei (鍾紹恢), as well as two former and current environmental officials, Lin Cheng-ming (林振明) and Huang Ming-ying (黃銘英).
Prosecutors asked that Chung Hsin-tsai and Lin be sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison and Chung Shao-huei and Huang be sentenced to five years each. It is believed that the accused earned at least NT$194 million by helping Sunny Friend Environmental Technology Co Ltd (日友公司), which runs the household waste incinerator.
According to prosecutors, who have spent nine months investigating the case, in 1997 the officials proposed building an incinerator in a buffer zone beside a river, where construction is prohibited.
Later, the officials forged documents to help Sunny Friend receive financial assistance for waste management from both the Cabinet's Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) and local government.
Prosecutors said the officials also forged documents to help the company to obtain an operating license from the local government.
The prosecutors also allege the company secretly burned industrial waste in the incinerator and dumped toxic fly ash and bottom ash collected from the incinerator in a nearby river, which leads to the Kaoping River (
Hsinchu firms targeted
In related news, in Taichung, 19 people involved in an illegal toxic solvent discharge case were also indicted yesterday, including United Microelectronics Corp (聯電) Chairman John Hsuan (宣明智) and Vanguard International (世界先進) Chairman Morris Chang (張忠謀).
Officials for UMC and Vanguard yesterday declined to comment on the indictments, saying that they had not yet received copies of the court documents.
In October, at a site in Wuji township in Taichung County, prosecutors -- accompanied by environmental protection officials -- caught workers hired by Ho Hsing Barrel Co (
EPA officials said that toxic solvents -- including potassium hydroxide, silica and hydrofluoric acid -- might have seriously polluted the soil where it was dumped and may have contaminated the nearby Tatu River (大肚溪).
Prosecutors allege that the sources of the toxic waste solvents were several high-tech industrial firms, including UMC, Vanguard and Daiion (太洋新技), one of the Taiwan branches of Japanese firm Mitsubishi Chemicals. Two Japanese officials with Daiion were also indicted yesterday.
Under the Waste Disposal Act and the Toxic Chemical Substances Control Act, prosecutors indicted Tsai Fa-tzu (
Li Ching-yi (李慶義), spokesman for the Taiwan High Court's Prosecutors' Office Taichung Branch, said the toxic solvent corrosive hydrofluoric acid was produced by Hsinchu-based Daiion.
Daiion sold the solvent to Vanguard and promised to recycle used barrels. Daiion, however, did not do so. Instead, prosecutors contend Daiion sold used barrels to two barrels companies, which later sold the barrels to Ho Hsing.
Spokesman Li said that Daiion also sold solvent to UMC but did not promise to recycle used barrels. UMC authorized a waste handler, Yunglung Environmental Protection Inc (
The EPA has searched for sites that could serve as final disposal sites for industrial waste in order to meet the demands of industrial companies who claim to have suffered from a lack of legal waste handlers on the island.
Several illegal waste dumping cases have been uncovered in recent years, especially in southern Taiwan.
The most notorious case occurred last July in Kaohsiung County when illegal dumping of toxic waste into the Kaoping River (高屏溪), left 3 million residents in and around Kaohsiung without drinking water for five days.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS