A fourth wastewater treatment plant on Siaoliouciou Island (小琉球) started operations on Thursday, as part of efforts to protect the ecosystem and biodiversity of the popular tourist destination off Taiwan’s southwestern coast.
Siaoliouciou Island is the only coral-reef island with human activity in Taiwan, boasting a large population of green sea turtles.
Presiding over the new plant’s opening, Pingtung County Commissioner Chou Chun-mi (周春米) said the four plants together are capable of handling 3,580 cubic meters of wastewater daily, or 90 percent of all wastewater produced on the island.
Photo: Chen Yen-ting, Taipei Times
Pingtung County’s environmental protection office has said that in the past, wastewater from Siaoliouciou Island was directly discharged into the ocean due to its undulating terrain and lack of a sewage system, polluting the nearby environment and ecosystems.
To protect water quality and maritime diversity along its coast, the first wastewater treatment plant on the island was established in 2017, followed by two others in 2021, Chou said.
She said the introduction of a fourth facility would effectively help the environment, which has been severely impacted by increased tourist traffic in recent years.
Last year, about 2.5 million tourists traveled to the 6.8-square-kilometer island, up from 2.1 million in 2021, Greenpeace project director Chung Meng-hsun (鍾孟勳) said at a news conference on Wednesday, presenting the results of an area marine ecology survey it conducted in August.
Chung and other experts said that coral reefs are disappearing, and fish stocks have declined dramatically off the island due to pollution caused by human activities.
He said the organization sampled reef fish in August to understand the island’s ecological condition, monitoring waters 10 meters below the surface across six tourist sites around the island.
They found the fish density in Siaoliouciou’s coastal waters was extremely low, hitting only 0.5 and 0.4 fish per square meter, for example, in Lobster Cave and Geban Bay, and at Vase Rock, the number of fish was found to have plummeted to 0.6 fish per square meter, down from 2.5 fish per square meter in 2010, Chung said.
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