The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) is unjustly listing Taoyuan’s Jhongli District (中壢) as the location where the rainwater is the most acidic, Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) said last week.
The statement came in response to Taoyuan City Councilor Pen Chung-hao (彭俊豪), who on Tuesday cited the EPA report, which lists Jhongli for the third consecutive year, and asked what the Taoyuan City Government is doing to improve the city’s air quality.
Cheng said that the average concentration of fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) in the city’s air was 13.5 micrograms per cubic meter, which is below Taiwan’s average and serves as evidence of the city government’s success.
The EPA operates one acid rain monitoring station in Jhongli, which measured an average pH value of 5.59 in rainwater samples collected from January until August, Cheng said.
Meanwhile the Taoyuan Department of Environmental Protection operates seven stations citywide, measuring average pH values of 5.85 in the same period, Cheng said.
A separate station at National Central University measured an average pH value of 4.96 last year, Cheng said, adding that he would ask the university whether the station’s location near a highway caused the high acidity reading.
Department Director Lu Li-te (呂理德) said that at least 60 percent of the acid rain falling in Jhongli is caused outside the district, for example due to pollution at the coal-fired Linkou Power Plant.
Lin Neng-hui (林能暉), a professor in the university’s atmospheric sciences department, said that Jhongli’s rainwater pH values have greatly improved over the past 30 years.
Thirty years ago, rainwater pH values were under 4.4, compared with 5.02 in 2019 and 4.96 last year, Lin said, adding that the most recent drop was well within the EPA’s standard margin of error.
This demonstrates the success of the city’s policies to control pollution, he said, urging the city to continue working on the issue.
The city government should seek to halve the level of pollutants emitted at the Datan Power Plant and urge all power plants in the municipality to switch to natural gas from more carbon-heavy fossil fuels, he said.
The city government is leading the nation in monitoring diesel-powered vehicles, with one measuring station each in northern and southern Taoyuan, Cheng said.
Moreover, Taoyuan has the highest number of electric-powered scooters nationwide and the smallest number of scooters with two-stroke engines, Cheng added.
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