Environmental protection advocates yesterday staged a protest in front of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) building in Taipei, accusing the agency of colluding with corporations to relax restrictions on controlled chemicals that are harmful to human health.
Trees Party chief strategy officer Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲) said ahead of a public hearing about draft amendments to the Water Pollution Control Act (水汙染防治法) that the agency only invited union members from industries whose operations would be affected by the proposed amendments, while environmental groups, including the Taiwan Water Resources Protection Union, were excluded.
The agency did not announce the hearing on its Web site like it normally does, Pan added.
Although the draft proposes adding 23 chemicals to the EPA’s list of controlled chemicals, the protesters said the move would open a back door for industrial and technology companies because the amendments would narrow the scope of control over several categories of harmful chemicals, resulting in less stringent rules covering industrial wastewater management.
Under the draft amendments, fluorides would be limited to fluoride salt, organic mercury would be narrowed to methylmercury, while hydrofluoric acid is to be removed from the list.
Pan said that it took environmentalists years of campaigning before a rule was finally promulgated to regulate toxic chemicals produced by the photovoltaic industry.
He said the EPA would be overturning what the environmentalists have accomplished if the amendment is passed.
Taiwan Water Resources Protection Union director Jennifer Nien (黏麗玉) said the group had served as a watchdog monitoring the distribution and safety of the nation’s water resources for many years, but it was excluded from yesterday’s public hearing, which she described as a “black box” meeting.
EPA Department of Water Quality director Yeh Chun-hung (葉俊宏) said that the amendments were proposed so that phrasing in the list and in the EPA’s standards on wastewater control would be consistent, a move intended to avoid possible objections arising from confusing phraseology during attempts to adjudicate on breaches of the act.
The proposal also aims to clearly define the EPA’s responsibilities; for example, the agency has examined methylmercury levels in industrial wastewater because it is the most toxic type of mercury and is known to be a threat to public health from past incidents.
Yeh said other types of mercury are much less toxic and do not pose such grave a threat to people, adding that the agency’s capacity does not allow it to monitor every kind of mercury in wastewater.
He said that hydrofluoric acid is almost impossible to detect in water, because the acid breaks up into hydrogen and fluoride ions, adding that the agency is concerned about fluoride ions possibly forming pollutants by combining with other metals.
He said that changing the wording of statutes to read “fluoride salts” instead of “fluorides” would facilitate law enforcement, adding that fluoride ion concentrations in water are regulated through monitoring fluoride salts.
The agency is to announce all public hearings on its Web site from now on, Yeh added.
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