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.
Starlux Airlines, Taiwan’s newest international carrier, has announced it would apply to join the Oneworld global airline alliance before the end of next year. In an investor conference on Monday, Starlux Airlines chief executive officer Glenn Chai (翟健華) said joining the alliance would help it access Taiwan. Chai said that if accepted, Starlux would work with other airlines in the alliance on flight schedules, passenger transits and frequent flyer programs. The Oneworld alliance has 13 members, including American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific and Qantas, and serves more than 900 destinations in 170 territories. Joining Oneworld would also help boost
A new tropical storm formed late yesterday near Guam and is to approach closest to Taiwan on Thursday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. Tropical Storm Pulasan became the 14th named storm of the year at 9:25pm yesterday, the agency said. As of 8am today, it was near Guam traveling northwest at 21kph, it said. The storm’s structure is relatively loose and conditions for strengthening are limited, WeatherRisk analyst Wu Sheng-yu (吳聖宇) said on Facebook. Its path is likely to be similar to Typhoon Bebinca, which passed north of Taiwan over Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and made landfall in Shanghai this morning, he said. However, it
Taiwan's Gold Apollo Co (金阿波羅通信) said today that the pagers used in detonations in Lebanon the day before were not made by it, but by a company called BAC which has a license to use its brand. At least nine people were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded when pagers used by Hezbollah members detonated simultaneously across Lebanon yesterday. Images of destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo. A senior Lebanese security source told Reuters that Hezbollah had ordered 5,000 pagers from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo. "The product was not
COLD FACTS: ‘Snow skin’ mooncakes, made with a glutinous rice skin and kept at a low temperature, have relatively few calories compared with other mooncakes Traditional mooncakes are a typical treat for many Taiwanese in the lead-up to the Mid-Autumn Festival, but a Taipei-based dietitian has urged people not to eat more than one per day and not to have them every day due to their high fat and calorie content. As mooncakes contain a lot of oil and sugar, they can have negative health effects on older people and those with diabetes, said Lai Yu-han (賴俞含), a dietitian at Taipei Hospital of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. “The maximum you can have is one mooncake a day, and do not eat them every day,” Lai
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