The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) yesterday held a committee meeting of experts to assess the differential impact of the sixth and seventh stages of the fourth-phase expansion of Formosa Plastics Group’s sixth naphtha cracker complex in Mailiao (麥寮), Yunlin County.
The sixth stage includes the establishment of a polycrystalline silicon (P-Si) plant, which would benefit the photovoltaic solar industry. P-Si is a key component in the manufacture of solar panels.
The seventh stage includes the construction of a hydrogenated styrenic block copolymer plant.
Prior to the meeting, environmental groups held a protest in front of the EPA headquarters, saying the pollution generated by the plant was leading to illness among the residents living near it and any expansion would make the situation worse.
The protesters said the expansion should go through a complete environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure rather than the more superficial differential environmental impact evaluation held yesterday.
At the rally, Janis Wang (王佳貞), from the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association said according to a report by Formosa Plastics, “the death rate and incidence of liver cancer among people living in Mailiao increased after 1995 and was higher than in other parts of Taiwan.”
Moreover, a three-year health risk investigation conducted by the Yunlin County Government showed that the lung and trachea health of residents in Mailiao and Taisi Township (台西) was clearly worse than that of people living 10km away, Wang said.
This was the result of chronic exposure to carcinogenic substances, such as vinyl chloride and benzene, emitted by the plant, she added.
The groups said the sixth stage would generate an additional 1,330,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year, which is about equal to the amount of reductions achieved during the past 10 years.
During the meeting, representatives from several environmental groups said the expansion plans would increase the original production scale of the plant by more than 10 percent and they have to go through a full EIA process. They added that the developer should provide investigation reports and improvement plans to prove the safety of the expansion plan since there have been seven industrial accidents at the plant in the past year.
The experts’ analysis focused on water usage, saying that water used for cooling at the plant should be recycled and could be redirected to the local community to relieve water shortage problems.
“It makes no sense for the local government to ask residents and farmers to reduce water usage while allowing the sixth naphtha cracker to shift its water usage to its newly expanded plants,” an official from the Yunlin County Environmental Protection Bureau said.
Committee members also voiced concerns about the expanded plant’s planned solutions to deal with pollution, saying that they were not explained in detail by the developer.
The meeting concluded that both the sixth and seventh stages of the expansion plan needed to be evaluated again at the next meeting after the developer submits supplementary plans on its water usage and greenhouse gas emission, as well as an analysis report on the impact of toxic chemicals on local residents.
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